Carnaval en Veracruz

Veracruz, a city two hours by bus from Xalapa, hosts one of the largest celebrations of Carnaval in Latin America. I’m also told that it rains every year. This year was no exception. The city has a reputation for being extremely hot, and my host-sister (who had been to Carnaval on Saturday) had told me that I should surely pack only shorts and tank-tops. She was wrong.

A huge group of us BCA kids took ride up Sunday and found that the afternoon parade had been postponed until 6 pm due to the outrageous wind which prohibited us from using umbrellas. So we broke up into smaller groups and walked along the main road that had been blocked off for the parade, which is maybe ten feet from the coast. Seriously, this city is built in the ocean.

When six o’clock rolled around we each paid twenty pesos to get spots on the bleachers, close enough to the ocean to pee into it. Before the parade came to us, our entertainment came from the raised platforms placed every fifty feet or so with half-naked people dancing on them (which we had seen earlier in the day – apparently it’s a full-time event during this week before Lent) and the folk walking along the street, most of them drunk and/or trying to sell food and beer to the crowd.

It was a good ol’ trashy time. The floats were very elaborate and the music was fun. After a while, we came down from the bleachers and danced with the people in the street and in the parade. The picture below is a pretty good depiction of it: The pink girls in the middle are participants in the parade. I know it’s kind of hard to see them. Sometimes it was less about the parade and more about the crowd.

The weather on Monday was much better. I was almost glad that I had brought my shorts. We accidentally saw a lot more of the city by hopping on a bus from the hotel and riding around for a while, not realizing that no one in the group had a destination in mind. We missed that morning’s parade, but got to see some of the floats by daylight (many were the same as the night before) as they were leaving the downtown area. One idea for the day was to go to the aquarium, for which there had been a huge line the rainy day before, but it was closed by the time we got there. So we walked around, soaking up some more of the atmosphere before heading back to familiar Xalapa.