After a weekend of fun, friends and Carnaval in Cadiz... getting up for work this morning was pretty rough! Well worth it though. I went to Carnaval for one afternoon last year, but did not really get the "true" Carnaval experience because we went during the day and did not dress up. We watched some of the typical Chirigotas perform, which are singing groups that dress up to a theme and sing silly songs that make fun for politics and current Spanish culture. There is a huge competition which ends the first weekend of Carnaval and on Sunday winners are paraded through the streets on big trucks singing and drinking the day away. It was quite a spectacle, but nothing compared to the night time revelry we say this year!
On Friday I took my friend Smita with me down to Puerto and we watched the Chirigota finals on TV at Hayleys house and prepared for the festivities by gathering the final details for our costumes and had some tapas. We dressed as a merry band of "bichos" aka bugs. We had bought butterfly wings and antennae at the chino for 1 euro and supplemented with various accessories and monocromatic clothing. In the end I was a "mariquita", a ladybug!
All of us:
Once dressed, we headed for the ferry boat that would take us across the bay from Puerto to Cadiz. We got there around 9pm and there was already a huge line of people in FULL costumes. People go ALL OUT for their carnaval costumes. The night time crowd is mostly adults... it is pretty funny seeing men my dads age dressed as babies, princesses super heros etc. A lot of people make their own costumes, or buy them. Some of my favorite costumes I saw were: flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz, life sizes yogurt cups, Gingerbread men, "Bender" from future-rama, one group had pictures of Barack Obama all over them, and various men dressed as impressively ugly women. The population of Cadiz is somewhere between 60,000- 70,000 people normally, but this weekend they projected that there were around 300,000 people in the city. From the crowds, I beleive it! The Saturday night we went was the big kick-off party and the plazas and streets were totally packed. The plaza in front of the cathedral was impossible. We had to squeeze through crowds for a long time before we found a plaza comfortable enough to exist in. But once we did, we had lots of fun. Carnaval is basically just a huge party in the street. Most people bring their own alcohol, or they buy "lotes" which conists of one bottle of alcohol of your choice, cups, ice and a 2-liter soda. We found a big group of other English teachers that we knew and we all had a really good time watching everyone in costume, socializing and just taking it all in. There was a stage with some Chirigotas playing, so we got to see some live music as well.
Oh the HUMANITY!!!
We did well even by Spanish partying standards and made it until almost 7am before heading to the ferry. This was about the worst part of the whole weekend though, because we stood in line to buy our tickets for almost an hour, for a boat that was supposed to come at 8:30, which would have been bad enough. The boats were of course running WAY behind Smita and I didn´t get on a boat back to Puerto until almost 10am! Waiting in the ferry station for almost 3 hours was pretty painful. We made it back to Hayleys and slept there for a while before catching our train back to Seville... which was also running behind. Once I finally made it home at 6pm, I quickly did had some dinner,showered and got into bed!
Sunday was rough but it was definatly worth one of the best parties in Spain! I will post pictures ASAP!
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