Carnaval Chicharrero

An odd thing was happening as I wended my reluctant way to work in the early morning sunshine today. As I prepared to face the working day, pirates, can-can dancers, vampires, ghouls and karate kids were slouching they way back to their beds……it’s Carnaval! In Los Cristianos the deserted streets gave off the feeling of a ghost town, the air was tranquil like when the first snow blankets the ground in Northern climes and muffles noise. It seemed like the whole world was in Santa Cruz for Fat Tuesday and the big parade.

Oddly, I struggled to find anything on YouTube which really conveyed anything like the atmosphere. This is the nearest I came, and you have to wade through some boring stuff too. It is shows how tv stations around Spain reported on this fantastic event last year.

Talk about Carnaval? Where to start? It’s a whole world, a magic that consumes your life for weeks, no, for months before your big day. What people see has been planned, practised, dressed, worried over and dreamed about for months, maybe even years before the finished display is seen on the streets.

Carnaval in Tenerife is reputed to be the second biggest in the world, the first being in Rio de Janeiro of course. It begins, well, it begins months before in the designing and planning. As soon as one year ends the planning begins for the next. The highlight for tv viewers is the election of the Carnaval Queen, which takes place around five days before Fat Tuesday. The “dresses” get more complicated, more glamorous and more imaginative by the year. Today they resemble a piece of architecture more than a dress, but the contestants for the honor of being Queen of the Carnaval have to tow, drag and dance their way fairly freely around a stage in order to be considered for the prize. This is a link to the fotos of this year’s winner in one of the local papers.

http://comunidad.laopinion.es/servicios/galeriasMultimedia/index.jsp?pIdGaleria=4315&pIndice=19

The hardest part of Carnaval for non-Latin people to understand are the Murgas. Musical groups,choirs I suppose you could say, mostly they are accompanied just by drums and the what look like the toy trumpets they tote, which sound like a paper and comb. Their costumes are almost always a riot of color, and their songs satirical and often, by today’s standards, both can be politically incorrect. Even after all these years, they are still a mystery to me. Here’s a sample from YouTube:

More familiar to outsiders are the comparsas, the very glam salsa troups, as famous for the scanty attire as for the dance :=) During the weeks prior to the whole party spilling out onto the streets, every theater and exhibition hall or indoor public space rings to the sounds and sights of competitions between these groups. These days every step and note is recorded by local tv, so every part of the island, or indeed, the archipelago can share the excitement.

For most people, though, Carnaval takes off on the Friday before Fat Tuesday, when the dancers, singers and revellers take over the streets for the next week. You’ve all seen that on tv or in movies, it’s parades and partying all night, crawling into bed at dawn, and waking at lunchtime to start all over again for a whole week….for those with the stamina! It is a feast of color and music and movement. It is remarkable for its good nature and lack of crime. Of course, there is crime, but nothing like the level you might expect of that you hear of in other places.

Bits and Pieces from a tiring Week

It’s been an odd week, me feeling as if in limbo for some of it, and weekend finds me tired, if not exhausted. I hesitate to use that word, because I have had much more demanding weeks in my life, so I feel guilty about using it, when it is largely self-inflicted and all in my own head.

What was neither, was following the news story about the patera which capsized off the coast of Lanzarote. It used up a fair amount of emotional energy, just listening to it, reading about it, knowing that it won’t be the last time….

Focus of my week was the paper I had to do for the social sciences course Thursday. Using the honor system I had to do it in examination conditions, and it freaked me out just as much as if I had had to go to an examination center. I developed mysterious aches and pains and some tachicardia, which had disappeared this morning, after a good night’s sleep. Handwritten, it had to be posted by yesterday at the latest. Any sensible person would have had it in the post some days before instead of drawing it out until the last second, but not me. Anyway, it’s on its way to Barcelona now, for better or for worse, so I have some nail biting days until I get the result. When my alarm went off to tell me time was up I was too emotional to read it through, since I couldn’t change anything, and I felt I had done it really badly. After filling in the forms, writing out the envelope and poured a large glass of Sheridan’s I decided to read it, and it didn’t seem too bad. Popped it into the envelope, sealed it all up and ran a bath. Then, whilst soaking I kept remembering things I should have included. Oh, well, too late now.

I have to say that I am finding the course much more engaging and interesting than the English Literature I did a couple of years ago, so I know the changeover was right. This did not stop me from considering giving up, though. I am finding it difficult in parts, but that is a challenge. Mainly, I was chaffing against the financial restrictions I am experiencing, and, frankly, the cost of this course would pay for me to go to visit Guy, so it wasn’t an easy decision to continue. The second negative was the amount of my time it was taking. I turned down invitations to all sorts of things over the last three or four weeks, and despite a small wave of cayucos I didn’t go on callouts, and I felt bad. I emailed with my team leader who rubbished my feelings of guilt, saying that each one of us can only give the time we have to give, as volunteers. As he used to be a volunteer, as opposed to someone brought in from outside, so he understands.

It was a tiring week at work too – talk of redundancies, which didn’t happen, and customers being even more agressive or clingy than usual – the times in which we live I think.

So close……..

On Sunday evening, around 6.30 / 7pm, when most residents of the islands were packing up after a pleasant weekend, the residents of Los Cocoteros, a small coastal village in Lanzarote, one of the eastern Canary Islands, were startled by screams and cries for help. A patera, a smallish fishing boat, had capsized, very close to shore.

This patera had begun its journey from the West Coast of Africa, probably Morrocco. It would have been designed for a few people to fish, haul in the catch, work in the boat, but this one carried between 28 and 32 people, who were desperate enough to risk the winter seas to try to find a new life in Europe.

Within meters of land the boat had overturned, as the churning ocean hit the rocky shore. Many of the people on the boat would have been wearing several layers of clothing – Atlantic nights are cold – so that even if they could swim it would have been almost impossible. The wet clothing would have dragged them down. Just six people survived.

That they failed to reach their dream so close to land adds a harrowing dimension to this tragedy. It isn’t the first boat to be lost on this desolate journey, and, sadly, it won’t be the last, but it has resonated with many people here. Of the 26 bodies recovered no less than 15 are said to be juveniles, some children as young as 6 or 8, one pregnant woman and the rest teenagers.

The full body count, no doubt will be confirmed tomorrow.

To their eternal credit several of the residents of the village rushed to help, especially one young man, a surfer, who launched his surfboard and helped pull victims to shore, before the rescue services arrived. Without him and his friends there probably would have been no survivors. His is the picture in the set of pictures you can find in this link, which looks slightly incongruous if you don’t know the story.

http://comunidad.laopinion.es/servicios/galeriasMultimedia/index.jsp?pIdGaleria=4279&pIndice=1

Tell me if picture number two isn’t one of the most upsetting you’ve seen. Our tv screens daily bring us pictures of starving children, homeless children, abused children in far-flung countries. We sigh. We pause for a moment. Maybe we get a lump in our throats. This child was trying to escape all of that.

Too full to write more.

Pitingo

Wonderful, wonderful fusion of flamenco and soul. I am loving this. Just “discovered” him on tv this weekend.

Just Spreading the Word

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I think I’ve flown in and out of Buffalo five or six times, if memory serves, and two of those flights were amongst the most memorable of my life.

Once, as we left for the sun of Florida, three days into the New Year, there were delays, as we sat on the plane and watched the de-icing being done. That was scary, me with thoughts of the infamous Manchester United crash, caused by icing. It was probably the first plane crash I ever heard of, and Buffalo on that chill day was one of the coldest places I’d been.

The other time flying out of Newark in a period of summer storms, we were confined to our seats as the aircraft bumped and shook its way through the skies. No-one on that plane wasn’t scared out of their wits, but we were kept in stitches by a wonderful, witty, camp steward, who made the journey a joy! At the end I remember telling him it was the best flight I’d ever had. I don’t remember which airline it was, but I so hope he wasn’t on that plane today.

My heart goes out to those who lost family and friends today.