Carnaval de Cádiz - Day 4

Sunday 10thFebruary

I must admit that I was still somewhat tipsy when I woke up at 11am, I popped onto Skype to see what the girls were up to, they were meeting at 12.30pm at Burger King for something to eat, so I got dressed and decided to meet them there. I met Claire on the corner of Plaza de Espana, the strets were littered with rubbish from the night before, but there were still many people around in the squares dressed in costumes, whether this was from the night before or people who had come out again that morning. Unfortunately for us Burger King did not open until 1pm, and by that time there was quite the queue gathering outside, luckily they were quick with the service and we got our Burger King in good time. After Burger King we decided to head home, Kath came to mine rather than walk all the way home, and we watched a film and had a little rest before we met up with the girls again later to get dressed in our rainbow outfit and head out to see what was happening with the ‘Carusel de Coros’.

The girls arrived and we changed into our costumes, each of us was a colour of the rainbow and I also wore the rainbow flag that Kath acquired from the Gay bar at La Punta. Just in case people didn’t recognise what we were. Once we were dressed we headed out into the streets which were again full of people, there were choirs on large floats attached to the back of tractors that periodically moved throughout the streets. Each of the choirs had their own theme, from Vikings to police officers and Mexicans, there was every type of costume that you could imagine. The crowds that gathered around the choirs made it very difficult to get through anywhere at any decent pace, but it was nice to just soak in the atmosphere with everyone hanging around enjoying the music and drinking in the streets. The only really bad thing was that some of the streets stank of urine when people didn’t bother to go to the port a loos, not that the port a loos smelt much better after the first night. We headed towards the old city gates where the parade was meant to finish, however by the time we made it there barriers had been set up by the police and we did not know how to get around them to the other side of the gates where the parade was due to finish. So in the end we unfortunately missed the parade completely. This was a real shame as people said it was very good, so make note for future that if you want to get to some of these events you need to get there early! The barriers had been set up around the gates to stop people getting too close to the gates where the fireworks were to be set off a few hours later.

We then headed off to get ourselves some food from the stalls located in the streets lining the port, we opted for Jacket Potatoes which were delicious and then some churros from the massive churro stall whilst Emma, Anissa and Sophie headed to telepizza (for the third time this week) to get some food. We all met up afterwards at my flat to regroup before heading over to Kiras flat, which is in the tallest building in the old town of Cádiz so that we could have a good view of the fireworks. We headed up to her terrace the view was great and perfect for the fireworks, but before 10pm when the fireworks were due to start one of the occupants of the block of flats came out and shouted at us that he would be calling the police. I am not sure why he did this because we were not causing lots of noise or drinking and it wasn’t even late, but he was so unpleasant that we decided to leave anyway, we instead set ourselves up on the sea wall. The view here was good, when the fireworks finally started, a little bit late but that wasn’t unexpected, the wind wasn’t overly pleasant though. The first few fireworks were a little disappointing but they soon picked up and the display was really nice, they made particularly good use of the blue and yellow colours of Cádiz.

Once the display had finished we decided to head to our favourite old haunt, the irish bar, for a final strawberry mojito with Claire. We all gathered together, and I am sure we weren’t the barmans favourite people when we ordered 10 strawberry mojitos at once, as they take a while to make, but it was definitely something that we needed to do before Claire left the following day. It was a really interesting day, the choirs were like nothing I have ever seen before!