Semana Santa = loco, Carnival tambien. Pt. 1

Hi all! ahhh. So it does appear to have been over a month since my last post! Let's just say I'm really adapting to the Dominican cultural trademark of being just a bit late all the time...

So I'm just coming off a little Semana Santa (which basically amounts to a country wide spring break, aka a MASSIVE party in Cabarete...we're talking reminiscent of MTV Spring Break Cancun. Not that I would know what that looks like, honestly, but I'd imagine it was something like Cabarete beach looked 2 weekends ago...) extravaganza. While we're on the topic of parties Dominican style, I actually want to include a note about Carnival, which came and went a couple months back without a blog post.

I don't really remember when I went to Carnival, but it was sometime in February. It's a festival that happens countrywide (though in some towns more than others) during every weekend of the month. The town of La Vega is the Carnival mecca of the DR, so naturally I had to check it out.

After a sleepy bus ride I arrived in La Vega in the early afternoon, along with some companeros from Cabarete. My first experience in La Vega marked the single most ridiculous car/ car-ride I have ever seen or experienced (and that's saying a lot coming from someone living in the DR). The car I got into at the bus station - a public car that would take us to the center of the Carnival action in town - had no back bumper (I forget what else it was missing, but it definitely should have been taken off the road about a decade ago), was probably about 40 years old, and appeared actually somewhat dangerous (again, saying a lot coming from someone who routinely experiences Dominican public cars/buses) due to the fact that the front dash was nothing more than a mass of unprotected wires, spilling out into the passenger seat area. It was way too funny, and frustrating that I couldn't appropriately document it with a photo from the backseat (which I was probably sharing with 5 or so people at the time) because I thought it would be a bit too obvious and perhaps offensive to the driver to suggest that I thought his car was a hilarious spectacle.

In any case, while I thought we would be driving Flinstone style any second, the car somehow got us to the center of town and we headed towards the loud music. So in short...Carnival was a huge party with a lot of beer and Brugal rum being sold under tents along the roads of La Vega. In the Carnival tradition, there is somewhat of a constant parade of costumed groups walking through the streets. These are mostly men. These men are also carrying rubber balls on the end of ropes. With these rubber balls they are also violently smacking the asses of bystanders (or, more specifically, anyone in the road...if you are on the sidewalk - where god knows I stayed - you're not really fair game). If you do get hit, some dude winds up and nails you with this rubber thing as hard as he can, and you end up with a welt/bruise on your butt/thigh that makes it look like you are in some sort of seriously abusive relationship. I'm still a little fuzzy on the details of where this tradition comes from or why anyone thinks it's fun/acceptable, but I think it might just have to do with the volume of rum consumption during Carnival.

In any case, that was the scene - tons of people in a big parade, and some in weird costumes or trying to sell weird things. For example, someone tried to sell me the opportunity for them to wrap their--oh, I'd say 15 foot --giant, live bright yellow snake around my neck for a photo for 100 pesos (aka $3). Not sure if everyone here is familiar with how I feel about snakes, let alone potentially deadly ones, but the guy was waaay off in suggesting that I would pay for that photo. Instead I took one with a man who looked like he had jumped in a bucket of tar...but probably black paint...and attached a really long tail to himself, along with some other freaky werewolf-like features. I definitely paid him, especially after he ran at me waving his tail in my face and yelling "money! money! money! money!". Never a dull moment here!