¡Carnaval!

This past weekend was quite the adventure for me. Like many countries, Spain celebrates the time just before lent with a rowdy week of celebrations. In Cádiz, a city surrounded by the ocean on three sides, the celebration actually lasts two weeks and is way more than just a party. It's a costume competition, a place where you can dress up as anything imaginable and show your creativity to the world. Also, there are group competitions of singing and costume creating as a team. Each team chooses a well know Spanish song, usually a folk song and changes the words to create some sort of parody, silly joke, or political statement. It's really amusing, but sometimes hard to follow or really understand when you don't know the original song.

So the bus to Cádiz left at 9pm on Saturday night. It was about a two hour ride down there, but I went with a four close friends and we chatted and sang Disney songs on the way there. Driving into the city, we saw huge decorated signs and banners and plenty of people walking around dressed up. Cadiz is on a small peninsula, so while it is in southern Spain and very popular in the summer because of its famous beaches, it was rather cold that night because of the wind coming from all directions. I was dressed as a gypsy (Gitana, or cíngara, if you want to be politically correct) so I was well covered. I wore a long patchwork sparkly skirt with tights, a couple random colorful shirts and a wide pink/green shawl. I also adorned myself with plenty of jewelry and huge purple earrings. My friends and I had all bought masks together as well, they were jest cheap paper eye masks but they were super sparkly and had pink and purple feathers on them so they looked pretty awesome. Most of the groups of people that go to Carnaval all dress alike, or dress to create a theme or family from a movie or something. We saw the characters from Shrek, the Incredibles family, several clans of men dressed as nuns, and quite a few groups of pirates. One girl that had been on the bus with us, Julie, was dressed as a pirate so any time we saw a group of pirates they would all shout "Oye, mira! Una pirata!! Ven aquí, un foto!!" It was quite the pirate comradery. There were people dressed as hippies, gypsies, doctors, nurses, cows, boxes of candy, old couples, Smurfs, trolls, fairies, princesses, kings, knights, witches, cowboys, spacemen…I could go on and on. It was basically Halloween and Mardi Gras combined into a weeklong competitive festival.

For the first half of the night we wandered around, enjoying the festivities and watching the shows on the random stages that were strategically set up in almost every plaza. There were plenty of places to stop and get food or something to drink, and my favorite was this little street vendor stall that was selling something similar to mini doughnuts. WOW those were amazing little fried balls of dough drizzled in hot chocolate and caramel and topped with powdered sugar. It was fantastic. Around 2:30 in the morning is when the discotecas start to become popular and crowded so we made our way over to the street where they were all located around that time. We found a good club and danced for a while and then went to another one. That's the popular thing to do, move from place to place so you meet new people and don't get bored. The whole time we were hanging out with a few other people from our bus: a few girls from Finland and Germany, and Julie, who was from France. Julie spoke Spanish really well so we talked with her most of the night; she was a lot of fun. She's also studying in Sevilla, so hopefully we will be able to hang out with her again some time.

The bus back to Seville was scheduled to leave at about 5:00 am, so we headed back around 4:45. The streets were still packed with people, but you could tell things were settling down. We snapped a few photos of main plaza to remember what it looked like and then boarded the bus back home. Back in Seville at 7am on a Sunday morning we weren't too surprised to see people still out on the streets at that hour. There were plenty of taxis out and a sufficient number of people walking home for me to feel safe walking along the main road back to my apartment. Overall, it was quite the experience. I don't know if staying out all night at a party like that is something I could do ever again in my life but I feel like it was worth it, and I'm glad I did it once. Luckily I didn't have anything to do that Sunday so I slept until 2:30 in the afternoon, and then took a nap again after lunch.

Well, that about sums up my Carnaval experience. I hope you were able to celebrate the start of Lent in some exciting manner as well. I will update you on my more recent excursions very soon. Keep in touch!!

Love love love,

Maia Jo