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?

Midweek voyage

A few weeks ago, the MGEN (the mutuelle, our supplementary health insurance) sent all the assistants in Martinique a letter saying that because we hadn't sent them our (nonexistent) payslips, our subscription rates would be raised to 1089 euros. Up approximately ten and a half times from the 104 euros it was supposed to be.

And on Thursday, I was called in to the official "hygienic site" of Martinique for the official visite médicale to validate our visas. There, they wanted to do both a chest x-ray and a skin test to determine that I didn't have TB. But I've already been in the country for four months, so if I have TB now, I've already contaminated everyone.

The point is that to régler all this, I had to take a midweek field trip to Fort de France. I stayed there for two days and consequently had a lot of time to kill.

Just for fun, I took pictures of all the stores in the downtown area named after American places. There are, surprisingly, a lot of them. In no particular order:

Wall Street.

Miami Beach. For one reason or another, Miami is EVERYONE'S dream vacation here.

New York Ave. Complete with the Statue of Liberty and the Manhattan skyline, at left.

Beverly Hills.


San Diego, CA.

Here's a bonus one, not taken in Fort de France but in the Galleria, the huge shopping center in Lamentin.

Les flics

Last night I had a run-in with the French police.

You'd think it would've been scary but it was actually the most hilarious thing that's happened to me in a long time.

Another assistant, Lily, and I had gone to Fort de France to meet up with some acquaintances at a bar. Which already wasn't the smartest decision on my part, because I had work at nine this morning and ended up nearly oversleeping. But that's another story. For the purposes of this one, I should say that Fort de France is at least a half-hour drive from where we live, so we don't go all that often and don't know the area very well.

We left the bar just after midnight. The streets of Fort de France were quiet. In the car, as we made our way towards the autoroute, we began flipping through the radio channels to try to find something good to listen to. Which can be quite a task in Martinique -- the stations are all either the news, talk shows, or random reggae or techno. Finally we came to a station that was playing Whitney Houston.

"Oh, my God, this is such a good song!" Lily exclaimed, turning the volume to level 20.

Lily turned down an abandoned street, and all of a sudden, there were flashing blue lights in our face and French men in police uniforms running towards our car. It was a one-way street, and we were going in the mauvais sens, the wrong way. Merde.

"Can't you turn down the music?" one of the cops asked. First Lily tried, and then I tried, to make the radio stop. I turned the dial to the left, and the music got quieter. Then, as I continued turning, I watched (and listened) in horror as the volume climbed to level 24. Panicked, I turned the dial to the right, to the same effect. Then I tried pushing button after button, but it was useless; Whitney was still going strong.

As I was doing this, Lily was trying to explain to the cops that we were sorry, we live in Trinité and aren't familiar with Fort de France, we were just trying to find the autoroute and we didn't mean to disobey the sacred traffic laws of Martinique/endanger all the invisible cars that were sharing the one-way street with us at 12:15 on this lovely Wednesday night. Or something to that effect.

By this point, Whitney is seriously belting. "IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!" It really, really couldn't have been any louder.

Lily tried to apologize for the music, but now, the French policeman, understanding that we were foreign, told us with a half-smile, "C'est pas grave."

I was already struggling to hold back laughter.

In desperation, Lily pulled the radio out of its socket, and finally it was quiet.

One of the French police then started giving Lily directions to the autoroute. He pointed out where to go and where to turn. Finally we said goodbye and Lily reversed to get off the one-way street.

"Thank God I don't speak much French," Lily said as we were driving away. "Otherwise they totally would've slapped me with a ticket."

As we turned onto the next street, we passed an ATM and Lily decided to try to stop and get money. Except the police car was still right behind us.

We pulled over and the police pulled up next to us, rolled down the window and started talking again. There were four of them in the car -- a full house. Didn't they have anything better to do on a Wednesday?

"Alors, c'est la radio? Ou c'était un CD?" one of them asked. They still couldn't get over, I guess, our cacophonous tribute to our countrywoman, Whitney -- towards whom now, miles and miles away from America, I feel a certain kinship.

Lily told them it was the radio.

Then they asked us where we were from, and Lily told them America. She explained that we were language assistants -- you know, the whole spiel. Non-French people aren't as common as you'd think here, so we end up having to explain this to people a lot, that no, we're not on vacation but that we have actual, legit, twelve-hour-a-week jobs here.

"Et votre amie, elle ne parle pas du tout français?" another of the cops asked. At this point, I realized I hadn't said a word during this whole ordeal. It had been Lily in the driver's seat doing all the talking.

"Si, je parle français," I managed to get out.

After we'd said goodbye for the second time, they drove in front of us. They turned on their blue flashing lights and as we began to drive after them we realized they were pointing us in the direction of the autoroute.

Once we were safely back on the road to Trinité, we exploded into laughter and pretty much didn't stop until we'd reached my driveway.

"Sometimes it pays to be a cute foreign girl," Lily said. "It can take you far."

Yes, indeed. Amen to that.