This is a post about the festival of Carnival, which takes place on the coast in Cadiz, Spain and lasts for a week. To put it simply; it is the biggest party imagineable. There’s no way that I could describe the atmosphere of this party, and because it’s pretty wild, I only brought my phone for pictures, and didn’t do a terribly good job of documenting it all.
I guess it just makes sense to start at the beginning:
Carnival involves costumes, and because Mark and I are quickly realizing the expenses of European living, we wanted to get costumes at the lowest possible price. Our new friends gave us the idea to go as sudoku, but we expanded it a little with Mark being a sudoku and me a word search. I’m not going to lie, our costumes were pretty basic, and when we got to the train station and saw all the crazy costumes people had, we were sure that we would be the duds of the party.
We basically came straight home from Aracena, ate, and headed for the train station, but unfortunately we missed our train. Luckily we got tickets for the next train at no extra charge, and headed for our gate. We had four bottles of beer in my backpack to save us from paying as much at Carnival, but to our dismay, it was illegal to take them on the train. So Mark and I, now minutes from missing a second train, but not wanting to waste 4 liters of beer, start chugging outside the gate, trash most of it, and run to get our train. Turns out the security was completely on the honors system, and we wouldn’t have had any problems. But with that said, I’m proud that we can say we honored the honor system.
Now, we had heard that the party actually begins on the train, and I had grand ideas about loud music, chanting and singing that I couldn’t understand, and a myriad of new spanish friends taking us in their arms and embracing us as their own. The train was actually just a normal ride, and aside from a few hooligans up front, was largely uneventful.
Getting off the train, we donned our costumes and followed the masses forward. It didn’t take long to find out something we didn’t see coming; everyone loved our costumes! (Moreso the sudoku, although I did have a lot of people come up and search me.) I can’t tell you how many times people would shout at us, “Sudoku!” or “Que buena”, and it kept up all night long. We were a hit.
It was pretty easy to find the party, because it’s absolutely enormous. There was literally a parade of people banging drums and everyone was chanting. We walked around and tried to see everything, and then reserved ourselves to the fact that it would be impossible. To say that we were a little over-stimulated at first would be a big understatement. There were people swinging from lampposts, dancing on scaffolding, and the costumes were so outrageous. One thing I wasn’t fond of was the fact that the men really liked to dress as women, and many took it way too far. Maybe the craziest thing was that in this chaos, there were actually a few families with children walking around!
I imagine this is the kind of place that was awesome for me now, but also a place I will never let my daughter(s) visit. It’s great, but there are some serious logistical issues like lack of restrooms (both sexes just used the alleyways, which had no drainage…you can imagine), and I found myself wondering, “Does the government know about this?”
To many of you, the rest of this probably won’t be too exciting because we got there at 10pm, I left at 8:30am, and in between you could say that pretty much I just stood around and talked to people. But it was a lot more than that.
I joined a crew of Spaniards on some scaffolding for a few chants, where I realized the main chant pretty much just said over and over again, “Alcohol”. And honestly, it was a pretty fitting chant for Carnival.
I met so many people, many of whom just loved our costumes and came up to talk to us. I wish I wouldn’t worn a head cam because some of these people were just absolutely ridiculous. There were a lot of hippies, cross-dressers, policemen, strippers (by my best guess), and a lot of bright colors.
This was some sort of chorus line that was broadcast on Spain's major tv station.
I met a lot of university students, and to my surprise got a lot of phone numbers, which in my opinion, makes them new friends. The biggest problem I realized this morning was that the party was so loud and my spanish ears so bad, I doubt a single name in my phone is correct. And there are about 4 numbers in my phone that I didn’t bother putting a name with. Friends nonetheless I say!
Early on, Mark and I actually were found by our Mizzou friends, which is pretty crazy in a crowd of a few hundred thousand, and we ran into other Americans off and on throughout the night.
Here’s a list of some other characters that I talked to last night:
A Spaniard deploying to Afghanistan in 2 weeks
An Irish couple that were drinking something along the lines of liquid fire
The drumline
A group of girls from Madrid dressed up as people from “Grease”
A clown who was the first to find all the words on my costume
And there were a few groups of Spaniards that I actually followed around for a while. It was with one of these groups where I lost Mark, or he lost me. I can tell from my text log that this was at 4am, which means we actually stayed together pretty well, even though we did in the end violate the buddy system.
There was one group of young people I was hanging out with, and I don’t want to toot my own horn but I’m pretty sure one of the girls named Rosa was pretty into me. At least it seemed that way at the time. I could understand her really well and she was very smart. I’m not sure how we got separated but it caused a wound that will probably take some time to heal.
That's Rosa in the center of the picture (blackest outfit)^
I was worried I wouldn’t have the energy to make it through the whole night beforehand, but to my surprise, the night passed much too quickly. Towards the early morning, I literally just wandered around for a long time, and when I regained functional consciousness and realized that I was in charge of getting myself home, it was 8am, and I was informed by a very polite man at the ticket window that unfortunately I would be unable to board the train home…mostly because I was at the bus station…but also because my train home was scheduled to leave at 6:45am, a fact that I had absolutely no concern for until that moment at the bus station.
Luckily, it turned out that the workers at the train station were eager to send me on my merry way, on the very next train. In hindsight, I bet everyone over the age of 40 who lives in Cadiz can’t wait for all the ridiculous adolescents to leave their beloved home.
As soon as I sat down on the train, I was asleep, and the kind of sleep that hurts burns your eyes to wake up from. However two girls, Claudia and Magdalena, must’ve been able to tell I was in the perfect mood to meet them, and they woke me up. They turned out to be very nice and great company on the train, and the fact that they were so friendly can only make me believe that Spaniards really are just a generally nice and happy bunch, or…these girls were probably 16. But because they woke me up, I got to see the sun rise, which in my mind put the seal on an unforgettable night.
I did realize in the middle of conversation that Mark was not with me, and although he was fine, and actually left on the train before we were scheduled to leave, I could only play in my mind a million tragic situations that could have befallen my sudoku friend.
I got back to Sevilla at 10:40, and although I knew the station was a very long walk from home, I opted not to take a cab. This would prove to be a very bad decision. First of all, I was disheveled, smelly, exhausted, and without a map; not a great foundation for wandering.
But wander I did, and although there were moments were I’d see a landmark and think to myself, “I know exactly where I’m going”, after a half hour I looked up and saw that I was walking toward the train station. Naturally I turned back around and forged on. After another half hour I was back at the train station for the second time, and although this should have been a slap in the face saying, “Get a cab, you idiot”, I took it moreso as a challenge to my manhood, intelligence, and nationality, and I kept putting one foot in front of the other. I can’t say that my journey from there got much better.
At one point, I asked a man washing his car where my neighborhood Triana is, and he looked up at me and told me very clearly that I couldn’t get there on foot. And when he realized that on foot it would be, he got that look in his eyes where I could see he’s deciding if he needs to bring me into his house to eat, shower, and get some water before my impending doom. He did point me in the right direction and wish me good luck, and after an hour and a half or so, largely spent trying to get a hold of Mark, I arrived at my apartment. Towards the end of my journey, there was a marathon happening on the street, and I was passed by a man who wore the scars of double knee replacement, and so old he could probably tell me what Ferdinand and Isabella were like. It was more than a little demoralizing, but I was motivated by the song “Eye of the Tiger”, which was playing in the background. Turns out after looking at a map, I had every right to be moving at a slow clip because by conservative estimates I walked at least 10 miles.
My foray home took me around 3.5 hours, and it wasn’t until a little after 1:30 that I collapsed onto my bed. When I woke up, I went through my backpack and found this...half of my costume that I salvaged out of the haze and chaos of the night.
Overall, Carnival was absolutely incredible and so much fun. I would love to do it again, but I think it would literally be dangerous to your health to do it more than one night a year.
PS- Since I wrote this on Valentine’s day, this post is dedicated to Rosa…
And sorry for typos.
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