Carnival

This past weekend has been one of the craziest of my life...

Thursday Night was an event called UWI Splash which was held in a town west of the Capital City in the Northwest tip of Trinidad. Im not sure what affiliation it has with UWI since it wasn't sponsored by the University, wasn't held in St. Augustine and was open to the public but none of that mattered.

It was like a huge concert and all the big Soca Stars preformed their most popular songs which was really cool. There were probably 8 different artists that preformed a few songs each. Carlos, a fellow Milnerite, was actually called up on stage to wine (a very sexual dance) with one of the performers and she ripped off his shirts he was wearing. We ended up waiting for transportation forever and got so bored that a few of us took off some clothes and went swimming in the ocean. Eventually I got home at around 8 oclock in the morning.

I slept most of the day on Friday. Eventually I woke up and for dinner we went to this great BBQ place that a whole bunch of Milnerites go to every Friday night. We spent the night just taking it easy and watching a Carnival event on TV called Soca Monarch which is where they crown the best Soca artist of the Carnival season, it was kinda boring and I dont even know who won but the people who actually knew all the artists were glued to the TV.

Saturday morning a few of us got up early and planned to go to Maracas Bay (the beach we always go to) for the day. We took the first maxi taxi to Port of Spain but when we got there they informed us that because of Carnival there would be no maxis going to Maracas until after the weekend was over. Instead of letting this ruin our day we just walked around Port of Spain all day and there was the children's carnival which is little kids all dressed up in crazy elaborate costumes.

We went back in the late afternoon to Milner and then at night came back to Port of Spain to see a show called Pan-a-rama which is THE steel pan competition for Carnival season. Even though we didn't buy tickets to this event it was held open to the public to see the bands as they wheeled the pan drums into the judging area so we were able to catch plenty of music. This event was held at the Savanah which is a huge park in Port of Spain.

Sunday we just kind of hung around all day and relaxed. Some people had tickets to go see Demache Gras which was a show from 7 PM Sunday- 1 AM Monday but a bunch of other people including myself slept until J'ouvert which started at 2 AM on Monday.

We ended up walking for about a half an hour to J'ouvert which is a moving party. Luckily we found a guy from Grenada who was headed in the same direction as us and he helped us find it otherwise it would have taken much longer. All the international students I am with ended up playing with a band called the Red Jokers and even though we dont actually play instruments they call it a band. The party consists of a huge truck with speakers on it in the front, 400-500 people with red shirts and joker hats behind that, a drink truck behind them and a paint truck behind the drink truck. We spent from 4 AM- 9 AM marching behind this truck dancing and getting covered in paint and mud and glitter. It was unquestionably one of the best nights of my life. Eventually we got back to our starting point where they had breakfast waiting for us which was bake (fried bread) with different fixings.

Even though we still had almost a 3 mile walk back it ended up not being that bad as we were all quite intoxicated and were able to entertain ourselves quite easily as we were walking. We finally reached Milner at 11 AM. I slept until roughly 6 PM Monday night and then took a nap a little later since I was still so exhausted.

We woke up early Tuesday morning to go check out the Parade of the Bands aka Mass which was similar to J'ouvert but much less drinking/ party oriented and more cultural. There were thousands of people dressed in elaborate costumes walking and dancing in the streets and the spectators on the side of the road never hesitated to jump in and dance for a little and return to their spots. We stayed there for most of the day but by 6 PM we were so exhausted from the weekend as a whole that we decided to call it quits.

Today classes started up again and the Carnival fatigue was noticeable throughout the classroom. This coming weekend, we are going to Tobago which is something everyone has been looking forward to for what seems like a VERY long time but it has only been like 2 weeks since we bought our tickets. Im really not sure about any of the details of the trip other than that we do have housing reserved (dont know if its beach houses, hotel rooms, etc.?) and that I have a ticket to get to Tobago on Friday night... everything else is up in the air so it should be an adventure.