Carnaval de Cádiz

This post is Rated PG-13, not for drugs/alcohol, violence, or language, but because of the content itself.

This has been one of the most eventful, crazy, hectic, eye opening weekends I have had since I've been in Spain.  And definitely a weekend I never want to repeat again in my whole life!  On Friday night, I hung out with some of my classmates.  We went to a restaurant/bar called Hannigans.  It was really fun to hang out with different people from different parts of the US!

Me, Laura, Laura, Patty, James, Liza

Liza, Me, Laura



Devin, Me, James

I got home "early" on Friday night, at about 2:30am.  You are proably thinking this is very late, but in Spain, the young people stay out til 7 or 8 in the morning and sleep all the next day.  I have done this  few times, and the next day is the most miserable and worthless day ever.  I got home knowing that Saturday night would be competely insane.  I woke up and got ready to meet my friends to take a bus to La Carnaval de Cádiz.  We had heard that we needed costumes, so we stopped by a little Chinese shop and bought random things to piece together to make costumes.  The bus ride was 5 hours, but we had one 45 minute break and one 30 minute break to change into your costume.

Alyssa and Me

Once we finally got to Cádiz, we got off the bus and followed the crowd of people.  We stopped to take random pictures.  In our group, we had 2 guys (Mike and James) dress up as Chinese women, all the girls were wearing basically the same things.. Mardi Gras/Gypsy clothing, and the other guy, Jason, wore wings and a bird mask.  We were very random compared to some of the other groups that were there.

For example, this group that was all dressed up as Pippy Calzaslargas (Pippy Longstocking).  This is a mixture of guys and girls dressed up as the same thing.  There were tons of people like this.. where their whole group dressed up as the exact same thing!  And for some reason there were tons of people dressed up as Pippy Calzaslargas.. very strange.

We knew we found the right spot when we found allllll the people!  There were so many people packed into this tiny little street, it was unbelieveable!  Again, we knew we just had to follow the crowd to get where we needed to be!

Street Art is VERY popular here.  People dress up like tons of different characters and people tip them.  When we were in Barcelona, there were countless people dressed up in costumes on the streets posing with people and taking pictures.  You have to tip them when you take a picture of them, but I didn't have any change handy, so I had to sneak this picture!!!



Our costumes were so bright and pretty with the sun shining on them! Unfortunately by the end of the night, our costumes were not pretty at all, in fact, I threw my whole costume away because it was either broken, spilled on, or ripped.  See ya later costume.

Another group of houligans.. Where's Waldo?

We found the beach to watch the sunset.  Unlike all my other beach pictures, these were taken on the Atlantic Coast!  The sunset was gorgeous!

Haha.. It was funny that everything that I was wearing was the same purple/pink color!! My mask, coat, gloves, and skirt!!!

There were a bunch of people from ISA that we met up with.. in total we had a group of about 25 or 30 Americans.  We found out very quickly that Americans were not liked by some of the Spaniards there, keep in mind, there will always be prejudism against Americans, just like in the USA there are prejudisms against all different types of people.  Some verrryyyyy drunk Spanish guys tried to fight the guys in our group.  By the end of the mini-brawl, there was glass everywhere and one bruised eye.  Luckily everyone else got out clean.  We knew we were not welcomed in that area anymore, and immediately headed to a different location.

While walking around we found these flower guys.  Very interesting!

There were thousands of people at Carnaval.  Everywhere we went, we made sure we had all 8 people in our group.  We knew that if we lost someone, they would be lost forever!

There was a guy that we were talking to that was like 16 or 17.  He was dressed up like a singer from the Flamenco shows.  He told me that he would sing so I could take a video of him!!

We left for Carnaval at 11:30am on Saturday and got back to Granada at 11:30am on Sunday.  We were awake the whole time (except the bus ride home, of course!).  By the time we left, our group had seen some of the most outrageous things.  We witnessed a brawl with glass flying in the air; a drunk American girl that wasn't responding, so she was carted away in an ambulance; a guy with the most ridiculous nose bleed; so much trash/body fluids in the streets and sidewalks, you can't even imagine; more people that I've ever seen in one small place at a time; and the craziest thing was there were NO police anywhere in sight.  Carnaval is literally a free for all.  Like I said earlier, it was quite the experience and definitely something I never want to do again!!!

On a lighter note: Today is El Dia de Las Mujeres.  I found out in class that the women of Spain were not "freed" until 1978.  Before 1978, in order to do anything, women had to get permission from their spouse, basically to do anything outside of the house.  This is extremely recent compared to our women's suffrage in 1910.  How crazy!

I also found out that my overall score for Level 5 was an 8.5 out of 10!!!! That makes me so excited! Encarna was so proud of me when I told her about my grades!

Encarna and I have been talking a lot about Austin Bice.  He was an exchange student at a university in Madrid.  He went to San Diego State University.  He and his friends had gone out one night to a discoteca and the doorman didn't let him in because he thought Austin was too drunk, but all 5 of his friends that he was with were able to enter the club.  Austin went missing.  They finally found his body today in the river in Madrid.  It is thought that he fell off a stone wall into the river because there are no signs of violence or harm done to his body.  How sad!  Encarna and I have talked a lot about safety.. don't you worry mom, I'm being very safe while I'm here!!!

Tomorrow will be the 6 week mark that I've been here! I can't believe it's been so long already. It's gone by so fast! I'll have a special post for tomorrow!!!