home pics blog Cape Verde

Day 237 - 1 March 2006 CARNAVAL in São Nicolau! what a trip! what they say is true...São Nicolau IS like a mini-Santo Antão! it’s pretty much just smashed together so that the mountains are steeper (although not as tall) and the valleys seem deeper since they’re right next to the mountain instead of spanning some great distance like they do on my home island. sure is beautiful though...and Ribeira Brava sure is a site, especially from our buddy’s living room window. he’s got quite the view of the town in the valley. his house basically looks like a castle on a mountainside in the back of the valley, complete with spiral staircase enclosed in a round turret! his place is super nice too, although very "asylum white" on the inside as we came to decide. we went for a li’l hike down to the beach and even saw birds flying! (there isn’t much wildlife outside of the water around here.) first day there my buddy gave me a tour of the town and we even saw the first of a million parades! it was the children’s parade and was soooo cute! all the kids were dressed up as different fruits and there must have been over 300 of them! IN-SANE! the next day we met up with another buddy that lives around there and we made masks out of paper-mâche. that was a good time! the layer of butter on my face work wonders for my complexion while the newsprint oozing with floury-water kept me cool on the super hot day. I made my mask look like the Scream mask, while our buddy requested a duck-billed platypus! pics here we cooked up a storm and ate it up even faster! risotto, falafel pockets, fettucini alfredo...what more could you ask for? we EVEN found instant oatmeal from the states in the super cool bread store! talk about a treat! wanna know the great thing about CARNAVAL? the 3 day never-ending party. just when you think you’re tired and can’t do any more, another parade begins! another group of people march into town beating drums and singing over industrial speakers on the back of a pickup! and there’s no way to figure out the schedule. even the folks who lived there didn’t quite know. the first night of parades was supposed to start at 10:00pm but didn’t really start till 1. and then there was the all inclusive after party! complete with soup, snacks and drinks! 4 drink maximum per night! of course, by the time you roll into the after party, you’re already all lubricated up that you don’t even need those 4 drinks to dance your polpa (booty) off! because of the late start the first night, we all got home as the sun came up and took a nap till the mid afternoon, wakin up for brunch as the day of parades began again at 5:00 pm. we just barely made it out of our pajamas by then! so we missed that one, but sure enough we made it to that after party! lemme get a HELL YEAH! and let’s just say one of us had a grrrrrrrreat time yellin "MAIS UN OUISKEY!" and no folks, it wasn’t me...(good guess tho) the third and final night we unveiled our masks and they were a HIT! nobody really wore masks as we thought a lot of folks did and because of that, WE were the ones that everybody was enthralled by. (maybe the 3rd night of the same exact parades was a bit on the boring side?) the kids loved my Scream mask and I started chasin and scarin some of them for fun. they loved and it we all had a good laugh. and of course, after the parades, what else could we do but try our darndest to use up all those drink tix! eventually we just started givin some away to kids (the non-alc ones of course!) and to other folks we’d just become friends with. we even made some friends by giving lightshows with the materials bein provided by Mr. I own every different kind of blinky, flashy, glowstick microlight known to man. good for him, and cool for us since he just seems to give them away whenever we all get together! although the trip wasn’t NEARLY as crazy as I’d prepared for, it was a great time with wonderful hosts and a super fun town who certainly goes ALL OUT as a community for the crazy days before Lent. kudos to them and to all the fun I had there... <--- Superbowl project                IST/AVC --->