Carnaval!

18 February 2012

This "winter," my weekends have fallen into a particular pattern. During the day, I might visit a nearby town/city. And at night, I go out with my friends for tapas or to eat dinner.
Incidentally, this weekend isn't much different, but there are two things that make it special.
1) It's Carnaval!
2) A girl from my alma mater is coming to visit Alicante!

This morning, I went shopping for a little while--just to take advantage of the remaining period of rebajas (sales).
And you can already tell that something different is happening in Alicante. I saw a whole herd of teenagers dressed up in costumes--at 11 AM! These weren't cheap costumes either.
There was a guy dressed up as Spiderman as well as another dressed in a real deal dog suit.

Around midday, the girl from my alma mater arrived in Alicante, and my friends and I showed her the highlights of Alicante.
First, we went to our favorite restaurant (J.V. Caballer on the Calle Mayor) for a fantastic menú del día. Of course, we had a real Valencian paella for our main dish!
Next, we walked up to the Castillo de Santa Bárbara to check out the sunset--incidentally my favorite time to trek up to the castle!

 The Castle of Saint Barbara during the day!

 Playa Postiguet as seen from the castle!

View from the castle

 After conquering the castle, we went back to my apartment to get our costumes ready for Carnaval! I didn't really have a fancy costume here with me in Spain--so I improvised a little. However, my costume ended up being very ambiguous. I wore a black and white striped dress with black tights--thinking that it would be obvious that I was trying to be a zebra.
Instead, my costume made me look more like a jailbird than a zebra, but I guess that's what you get when you just put together clothing that you already have.
I had friends that dressed as a pirate, a chef, Pocahontas, and a cheetah.

We went out for some tapas and then joined in on the celebration in the streets. There was live music, dancing, and general merriment.
We saw quite a number of interesting costumes: police people, monks/priests/bishops/nuns, Waldo (Where's Waldo), Smurfs, babies, pirates, and various types of animals. I was really impressed! People really went all out on their costumes!