Feb 2nd - Day of Costumes and Starting Carnival

When I finally woke up, and came down for lunch, Adrian was waiting anxiously to play with me. we played with legos, cars, and dinosaurs. We built a little stand for the camera guy to see the race (with cars he built), an announcer, and an audience. Then I took a short siesta and started to see what was the plan for the night with friends. Carnival had officially started the night before so Saturday night would definitely be crazy fun. During the day they have music and close off the plaza and everyone wears costumes. Which we had missed, but it was okay since Carnival lasts until Ash Wednesday. But out tonight, everyone would still be dressed in costume and ready to be out partying late. When I met up with my friends, we walked towards a tapas bar to meet Victoria and Dominique when we saw some of the costumes. They were Cleopatra, Egyptians and Pharaohs. So okay, now I should explain the costumes…they can be anything or any theme you want. It’s like Halloween but not. I mean we saw girls dressed as cute devils, guy with massive afros and glow lights placed in them with 70s clothes on, Greek gods and goddesses, sandwiches (yes I do mean that), barn animals, even cartoon characters. And everyone does it, even if you are working at a restaurant, you wear your costume. (age is no restriction either) the tapas bar we went to was pretty cute. Definitely a hole-in-the-wall kind of place with loads of natives…so we found a table and sat down. A table of girls next to us order what looked like little, fat hot dogs on a stick and were held over a bowl…and it was on fire! The girls seemed shocked and weren’t sure how to put it out so they asked the bartender to do it. Then our Grecian goddess, in costume, waitress asked us what we wanted. I order the chorizo…I wanted to see if it tasted different then what I’ve had. She brings us our order and brings me the same as the girls from the other table. I tell her no, I didn’t order this, I ordered the chorizo. She looks at me and says, this is the chorizo…oh no. All of our eyes got really big and she lit it on fire. No! How do I put it out?! She tells me, but unfortunately I don’t understand her because I can’t translate the words. She sees that I don’t understand and after trying once more to explain and me not understanding still, she stands with me. Turning it to cook the chorizo, then she says wait, it will go away on its own and leaves. She was right! That’s what she was trying to say! It was pretty good…then we all walked down to Can-Can. For the first few hours it was us and all our friends from school…fun. And our bartender friends were working that night so it was another zero euro night! Then 3am or so came and by then it was nicely packed. Everyone was dancing, and we were having a great time. 4am came, and we were seeing more of the carnival people there and their costumes were awesome! Pirates with mustaches drawn on that looked like the ‘french’ moustache with the ends curled. Pilots, peasants and even a joker! He was half white and half black, literally!! Half his outfit was white, the other black and so was his face with costume makeup. The accents drawn on his face were in the opposing color. He must have noticed my awe at him and me pointing it out to my friends because he then made a shocked face and smiled at me. oops. By 5am, the place was still overflowing with more and more people and we were getting too cramped. It was hard to walk through to the bathroom faster than 5 minutes. So we all left and went home. Lots of fun though…carnival is definitely way cool.