Our Trip to a Costume Carnival (but Hold the Carnival)

featuring self-inflicted nausea, parade ambivalence, $2 margaritas (unrelated to the self-inflicted nausea) and lots of pirate costumes.

I am – look, I’ll just say it – ambivalent about parades. I think maybe what’s often enjoyable about parades is that you stand around and watch them with your friends, drinking something hot if it’s cold out, and drinking something cold if it’s hot out. Every once in awhile, you point at a float, or at a car with twinkly lights on it, or at a guy in a costume (depending on the size of the parade) and say, “Oh look!” and the parade keeps moving along. Maybe it’s just related to my anxious personality, but parades sometimes do, in a literal sense, feel like the world passing you by. I can talk to my friends and drink hot cocoa and point at things without a parade!

But last weekend was Carnival in Spain. Carnival, we had heard, was colorful and boisterous, with costumes and decorations and a big parade. Sort of like Halloween, but a little more like Mardi Gras. Concerts and parties and drinking in the streets in a big show of debauchery the weekend before the start of Lent.

Of course, we had to go. Because you’d be surprised how often we do things we might not otherwise be interested in for the sake of “experiencing Spanish culture.”¹

Jeff got us a hotel room in the city, and we left for Alicante on Saturday afternoon. As usual, I insisted on reading during the bus ride, even though it always makes me a little bit motion sick, so I was nauseous when we arrived. At this point, I pretty much associate the Alicante bus station and the 15-minute walking radius around it with nausea, because it always takes a bit for it to wear off.

I was ready to rock.

Alicante is a seaside city, and, when we first arrived in Spain last September, we made it our home base for a week, staying in an Airbnb while we toured apartments and I got a Spanish SIM card and we did a million logistical things in between going to the beach and museums and restaurants. We arrived in Alicante with a year’s worth of luggage. And yet, we still chose to stay at an Airbnb that was at the top of this staircase.

The price of charm

Maybe it’s because the huffing, puffing, sweaty journey up that staircase with no small percentage of our worldly possessions really cemented the memories of that week in Alicante. But we agree it feels like we were there for much longer than a week. It was a week full of possibility and stress and excitement and marveling. After months of planning and scheduling and applying and crying (just me) and wondering if this would actually happen, we’d made it to Spain. And now this was our view.

I took about a dozen pictures of this view each day.

We sat on the balcony and ate Spanish cheese. We laid on the beach under a cute umbrella. We shopped for groceries at a Spanish grocery chain. We’d made it.

It felt like the opposite of watching a parade, in which everything relentlessly passes you by. Like we had passed by so many of the obstacles we thought might foil this mission, and we’d made it, and now the world was opening up to us.

So, despite the consistent self-induced nausea, I’m always happy to be back in Alicante, a place so rich with personal possibilities.

By the time we checked into our hotel and had fish and chips at a Spongebob-themed restaurant (culture!!!)² it was early evening, and the streets were already throbbing with people in costumes: A man dressed up as a baby, while carrying an actual baby; a group of girls wearing headbands to pay a classy and subtle homage to the Toy Story aliens. A whole family of Batmans, two families of Pac-man characters, two pharaohs, seven clowns, twelve cops, a half dozen Harry Potter characters, and one Goku.

It felt claustrophobic and energetic and, actually, very American. It reminded me of being on the streets of Austin during Halloween or SXSW. But with more strollers and less alcohol. The early hours of Carnaval are pretty kid-centric.

The parade, Jeff had read, was supposed to go from one of the main streets over to a plaza. It just so happened that the plaza was right next to our old Airbnb, or, as Jeff joked “our old place.” We meandered over, stopping for drinks along the way. First an Irish pub, through which a little Batman and a little butterfly chased each other around, and a red-faced man bobbed his head along to dad rock on his barstool. Then, a remarkably cheap Moroccan bar we’d gone to back when we used to be locals (I’m talkin’ $2 margs). Then, onto the plaza, where we watched a bassist and guitarist (dressed as a dinosaur and a doctor) do what was perhaps a drawn-out soundcheck, or a series of lengthy warmups. Or maybe an avant-garde set of mini concerts?

While we waited for the parade, we took the two-minute walk up to our old Airbnb, to reminisce on when we used to live there, and what a big and lasting impact we’d surely made on the neighborhood. I felt a little bit like someone who graduated high school two years ago but makes visits back to campus as if they’re still relevant. I tried to say hi to a cat I recognized from October, but she acted like she didn’t even know me.³

We went back to the plaza and started to wonder… the parade should arrived by now, and we hadn’t seen anything. There was a big crowd in the plaza, the dinosaur and doctor were finally playing for more than 20 seconds at a time, but no procession.

We’d come to Alicante for the parade, and we’d missed it. We hadn’t seen any floats, or confetti falling atop people in unsettling masks and over-the-top headdresses. We hadn’t seen fireworks or a marching band or a grand finale.

But we’d seen the people of Alicante having a good time. We’d seen feather boas and funny signs⁴, flirting teenagers waiting outside of a club, at least a dozen little kids dressed up as superheroes. We watched a middle-aged couple dancing to the live music with intimidating levels of vigor and vim.

It’s funny to have missed the main event, but it was nice to feel like we were a part of something. Maybe something better. We were in the middle of a city that felt, in a strange and perhaps unjustified way, a little bit like our own, instead of watching the city pass us by.

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Question of the Week: Catholic or not, are you giving something up, or trying to form a new habit, for Lent this year?

Recommendation of the Week: I love the website Information is Beautiful, which features really specific data made into beautiful graphics. The “Who Old Are You” graphic plots the ages different famous geniuses or artists reached were most productive. Or “International Number Ones” shows what category each country ranks No. 1 in — because every country is the best at something. Spain is No. 1 in LGBTQ+ tolerance, for example. The U.S. is No. 1 for spam emails. Canada is No. 1 in donuts.

Thanks for reading!

1. Like eating squid, or watching football, or momentarily considering taking a dance class, for example.

2. “Calamardo” means “Squidward” in Spanish.

3. traitor

4. V is for