A Caribbean Carnival

When I was fourteen I competed in a gymnastics meet called the Caribbean Carnival. It was right around this time of year, in March, and there were Carnival masks and decorations and one of those duck pond games where you turn over the right duck to win a prize (in this case, a free leotard).

This week, I got to live the real thing. I spent five days in Trinidad, which hosts the world's largest Carnival outside of Rio, and got back to Martinique just in time for the Ash Wednesday festivities in Fort de France.

The Carnival celebrations in Trinidad open at 4AM on Carnival Monday with an all-night street party called J'Ouvert. There's soca music, dancing, and raucous merrymaking. Most importantly, everyone parades through the streets and splashes each other with paint made out of mud and oil. We were washing that stuff off our skin for days afterward.

The days that followed were a blur of glitzy costumes, feathers, masks, jewels, face paint, stilt walkers, steel drums, Trinidadian street food and blaringly loud (and annoyingly catchy) soca and calypso songs. The whole thing was an explosion of colors and sights and smells and sounds. A sensory overload. As our taxi driver in Trinidad told us, Carnival isn't so much an event as an experience. It's a hard thing to put into words.

At the Ash Wednesday celebrations in Fort de France, everyone was wearing black and white to mourn the end of Carnival. There were the same types of parading/yelling/drumming/noisemaking as in Trinidad, just on a lesser scale. At the end of the night, the burning of Vaval took place. In Martinique, Vaval is the name of the mascot of Carnival, but its identity changes every year. It's supposed to be some kind of personnage or entity to be mocked, usually a celebrity or political figure. This year, however, Vaval was Facebook, or "Fésbouk" -- a play on words, since the latter spelling means the butt of a goat in Creole.

When Vaval was burned, Carnival was officially over, and everyone started singing Auld Lang Syne in French.

Some photos here.

I've been to some crazy parades in my day (Pride in San Francisco, anyone? Or Bay to Breakers?), but never a prolonged, week-long celebration -- a national holiday, really -- devoted to wearing ridiculously chintzy costumes and letting loose in the street. I thought it was great. We don't have anything like that in America. People take themselves too seriously for that.

Throughout the week, I thought periodically of that gymnastics meet so many years ago, and the fourteen-year-old I once was. I can't remember the particulars of the competition, really, but I still have the leotard I got -- coincidentally, it was all black and white, just like the Ash Wednesday paraders in Fort de France. Back then, I never would have imagined I'd get to experience a real Caribbean Carnival one day. It's strange to think how much has changed since then, isn't it? Thank God I still don't have the blinders I wore when I was a freshman, when my whole world was gymnastics and school and my appearance, or whatever other minutiae I worried about as a teenager. And who knows what eye-opening, perspective-altering adventures are yet to come?