CARNAVAL

The man in the white is my salsa teacher, Ariel!

My daddio recently informed me that it´s Marti Gras up there in the motherland. Here we don´t celebrate that (it´s no New Orleans, folks) but there is CARNAVAL, which is really huge in Brasil and in Corrientes Capital, the city over the bridge. They claim themselves the federal capital of Carnaval, although most of the peopel you ask here will tell you that 10 years ago, they comparsas were even BIGGER, the dancers even SEXIER and the joda... inexplicable.

I went for the last night of carnaval (it goes on from the end of Jan to the end of Feb) with Graciela, my third host mom, her boyfriend, and a friend of hers. I was going to go with Juampi and his sister, but that fell though on account of him having a Y-chromosome and my host father being strict. That´s okay though because I really wanted to go. I really wanted to have the experience of being there- carnaval in South America isn´t something I would have been happy about missing.

CARNAVAL was excellent. The people were so excited, and the dancers were absoluely amazing. Everyone was spraying foam (they call it snow) so we all got soaked.

At first, I really didn´t know where to look. All of the dancers were incredibly good looking (at least in the body department), recklessly close to nakedness and moved so well. It made me want to go to the gym and to dance classes every day :P There were also groups of little girls dancing, it was crazy how well some of them already knew how to dance, they just grow up with it, I guess.

There were lots of men there who obviously went to oogle the ladies. There were two me in the bleachers in front of us (there was the lane for the dancers in the center) who spent the ENTIRE night (22:30-06:30) leaning over the enge of the rail and asing the dancers to kiss them. They were both kind of large and not very handsome, but by the end of the night their faces were covered in red lipstick kisses.

I wanted to take pictures, I really did, but my camera ran out of battery during the first comparsa and that was that. Luckily, tucorrientes.com took a ton of fotos, and so I´m taking some from the illustrious website (which you sure can visit if you want more pictures of the ladies) and posting them here so you all can get a taste of the excitement!

A word about the outfits. They are all handmade of tailor made but the dancers or their families. No one pays you to be in carnaval, not even in the drum section. No one pays you to make your costume and if you want to dance, you certanily don´t complain about the fact that you have to get a new outfits EVERY YEAR. People spend thousands of pesos making thos things, buying the feathers, gluing the beads... God knows how they get the unsupported, side-strappless thong bottoms to stay on, and I sure don´t want to find out.

Okay, I really do, but that´ll be a story for another post.