So, being exhausted from Thursday night's Carnival activities, I haven't done much this weekend. I did sleep a lot on Friday and if there was anything fun going on in town, I definitely didn't make it. Saturday on the other hand was absolutely amazing!
Saturday is the day of the big Carnival parade in Bilbao. My family had talked about it a bit so I had assumed they were going to take me, so I had gotten absorbed in homework and planning my Spring Break trip and didn't even notice that the parade had already started until it was a little late to go. I didn't even know where it was. Lucky for me, my friend Gus called at around 6:15 (the parade started at 6) and asked where the heck I was and to get to the Abando neighborhood ASAP. Also lucky for me, Abando is only a 10 minute walk from my house so I got to the parade with about a half an hour before the end. I'm so glad I made it.
This isn't anything like the Custer County Fair Parade with decorated pickup trucks or people running out of candy. The carnival parade is legit. Everyone had some type of car that they had specially made for the parade. Most of them that I saw were campers or school buses painted and with the sides cut out so you could see the float. There was music blasting on each float to go along with whatever theme the group chose. Most groups were advertising night clubs or entertainment for Carnival. Each float had about 20 people following along throwing out candy and sometimes stopping to perform silly dances. One float had a large group of penguins following behind and they stopped every few minutes for the kid penguins to do a dance and song. It was very cute! Other floats had bands performing live, and one even had a magician sawing people in half as he rolled down the road.
There were two things that each float had in common: lots of candy and amazing costumes. I was very thankful that it was sprinkling and it was alright for me to have my umbrella up because every few seconds we would get rained on with candy and my umbrella was the only thing protecting my head from getting pelted with candy. But by far my favorite part of the entire parade were the costumes. Not one costume was crappy. The store-bought costumes that people wore looked like the expensive kind that you would special order, definitely not something you would buy from Walmart. But even better than the store-bought costumes were the homemade ones, and just like the store-bought ones, these costumes were incredible. I can't describe to you how perfect all of these costumes were, and they weren't easy. Entire families would all have the same costume, like a dog or chickens. I'm trying to come up with words to describe how cool these costumes were but I'm coming up blank, so please use your imagination and Google, and hopefully one of my friends has a picture I can link to this later. But by far the most common costume was boys dressed as girls, wigs, bras and all.
After the parade, we walked down to Casco Viejo (the old part of town) which is right on the river. The had an actual carnival set up along the water. It looked like something straight out of a movie. There were tons of rides, games, and Spain's version of fried food on a stick (basically just candy apples and churros). A friend bought a stick on cotton candy that was bigger than 3 heads combined. There was a ride like the ones in the USA that spin around so fast that you stick to the wall, but this one went a little slower. But instead of being strapped in or having a place to hold on, the kids were free to run around as the ride was going. Kids were falling all over the place and I have no idea how they all stayed in the actual ride. We decided that it wasn't possible to have a ride like this in the United States because it's a lawyer's nightmare.
After walking around awhile, I decided to head back home for supper. Roads were closed for two entire metro stops to accommodate all of the people and events. There were two different stages set up for singers (I'm sure no one famous, the Biebs doesn't come until June). Though the celebration in Bilbao isn't nearly as big as in other cities in Europe, I would guess I saw around 10,000 people yesterday enjoying all of the festivities.
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