Last weekend I went to Zomercarnaval in Rotterdam, which is like the Caribbean festival in Toronto. Big long parade with tons of very colourful costumes. My friend Jimmy would have really liked the costumes! This was the very first time I actually ran out of memory for my camera. I guess 1GB is not enough for these kind of events! It's mostly because I took over 20 videos as well, so that eats up a lot of space. I guess I will have to buy another card to have for special events like that.

So the zomercarnaval parade was quite something else. The parade was only about 2 1/2 hours long, which isn't that bad, but man, the route they took! The people in the parade must have been marching for about 8 hours!! I think it started around noon, and then I saw most of it from about 1:30 to 3:30. I got tired by the end and went to check in to my hotel. And then around 5pm I went out to the street festival that was on after the parade. This took place in the middle of the city, which I thought was quite unusual. Why not a prak? But then when I got there I realized why, there were thousands and thousands of people. I found out later, that the event is supposed to draw a million people. Crazy.

So, they had great food from the caribben and africa, so that was real good, I had more than I should (2 helpings!), and a few beer, was wondering around to the different stages and musics, it's a huge area around the center of town, and then got to one area and realized that people were standing around obviously waiting for the parade to come by! So sometime between 6-7 I watched another portion of the parade again! It had circled around town and comes through the very center of the city around 7pm. Crazy.

So in the pictures you can tell the afternoon parade from the evening because of the direction (in the afternoon I was on the right of the parade, looking at them coming, in the evening the left). And in the videos you can really see the difference. It's like two different parades. In the morning everyone is sober (a lot of the people in the parade were drinking :), and everyone has lots of energy. In the evening a lot of people are drunk and you can tell they just want to get out of the costumes and rest. In the morning it's very organized, people are careful not to get in the way, etc. In the evening the crowd is drunk too and joining in the parade, dancing with the people, singing along, etc. It was a very interesting spectacle.

I was exhausted by about 7pm though and walking back to my hotel, again the parade was going by the same place it went by when I watched it in the mornng, just in the opposite directions!! Still lots of spectators, and they probably had another hour of marching to get back where it started!! Those poor people! Well, it must be fun though for them to do it year after year. All in all a very cool event.