Entroido/Carnaval
I’m way behind on events, here. About two weeks ago (at the same time as Mardi Gras) we had Carnaval (Entroido in Gallego) here in Lugo and Fonsagrada. It was a big freaking deal at school.
I was told it was absolutely mandatory to wear a costume to school, so I scrounged around the clothes I have here and found enough for this costume:
The rest of the teachers were pirates. Classes ended at noon, and everyone went off to prepare their costumes. All the teachers were in the staff room getting dressed and goofing off, and all of a sudden the vice-principal said “wait, who is out in the hall with the kids?” About four teachers ran out. Spain.
They love me.
This is one of the history teachers, by far the best pirate:
And I’m not allowed at all to post pictures of students, but I don’t think this nightmarish image counts as a photo of students:
They made those Simpson heads in art class. The Simpsons is very popular show here, and I just recently found out that America’s Funniest Home Videos is on tv here too. They dub the voices. I need to find it and watch it.
At school, the kids had a costume contest where they each did little skits or dances in their costumes and were judged. The 12-year-olds dressed up as a “really badly behaved class” and did a skit as such. They had to dig really deeply into their wells of creativity to summon the ability to act like a class that threw stuff, screamed all the time, and jumped out of their seats to hit each other. (Did you not the dripping sarcasm? Ok, good.)
The winners were the oldest kids who dressed up as cookies. The Simpsons masks were really well-done, but totally uncharismatic and I think everyone was mildly horrified by them, so they didn´t win.
It was all cute fun at school, but then when we went out dancing that night, there were some extremely horrible and stupid costumes. I would say one of the most popular costumes was a Native American (braids, leather-looking little dress) and one that followed close behind was ¨Black Person¨. I didn’t get any pictures of the Black People out dancing, but here is a picture from the parade of an example of someone in their Black Person costume:
There you go. The worst Black Person costumes I saw were a bunch of girls with that Afro wig, blackface, black long sleeve shirts, and long colorful sleeve-less dresses. I’m pretty sure they had something under their dresses to make their butts look big too. So that was a downside of Carnaval, completely politically-incorrect Spanish people.
But there were some super-great costumes, too! These are from the newspaper article about the parade:
Yay!
And there was some sort of evil carnaval bear or something in one of the nearby villages:
I don’t get it, but there he is. Killing…people…
Also, side note, carnaval is even more popular in the villages of Ourense, which is south of Lugo, and at some celebrations, people take burlap sacks, fill them with ants, sprinkle vinegar on them to get them enraged, and then hit people with the bags. Ants fall out the holes and into people’s clothes and bite them.
I am not making this up. I had people repeat this fact to me about five times because I didn’t believe it. I can’t even be upset about the animal cruelty there, I’m just so flabbergasted as to why anyone would even think to do this as a celebration activity.
