It's Carnaval!

This week was one of the most incredible events we've ever been witness to in any city we've lived in. Starting early last week more and more people began to show up in this city from all over the world for Carnaval. On Saturday was one of the biggest events,  the fireworks display. We tried to prepare by parking our car right outside one of the streets near our friend Diane's place. She hosted many people and had an amazing view.

The show began with 150 drones buzzing around the night's sky creating evolving images with colored lights. Phoebe said it was a coding masterpiece. Then began the great "battle". Ships anchored offshore launched more fireworks than I'd ever seen at once. They were recreating France's attack of  Mazatlán.

It's almost impossible to describe how intense this show was and how packed the crowd was!!
I was very grateful for the view we had and the fact that I could watch without being in the throng of people.

The fireworks ended around 11:30pm and we waited for an hour or so for people to leave, but the bandstand out front kept people dancing and partying, so we just decided to try and go. We got to our car and slowly made our way through the crowds. A ride that was normally 18 minutes took over an hour and a half home.

Getting a ride in his Mom's cart

Other Carnaval events continued for days. It was hard to keep track of but there were bandstands with music all over the city. There were also two parades. One on Sunday night and one on Tuesday evening. We had decided to go on Tuesday, so we could recover and watch again from Diane's house.
Unfortunately, Mike woke up terribly sick. Then just before we left, Naomi threw up! So just Phoebe and I headed down that afternoon.

After we arrived downtown (we just ubered), we decided to take a walk through the crowd before the parade came. The crowd was much thinner on Tuesday and full of families. Phoebe took this shot of me with my millipede.

This is one of many statues erected for the event!

After walking around for a bit the sun dipped in the sky and the parade was here!
Phoebe and I raced back to Diane's and gathered with her friends to watch.

These are some of the hundreds of dancers that participated.

              Just an amazing float full of dragons!

More dancers and floats on the horizon.

All of these floats were incredible. Diane said they try to outdo themselves every year!

    And they just kept coming! More dancers! More floats!

The peacocks on this one were just beautiful in person.

Some of the aboriginal dancers.

This is the float they danced in front of.

This spectacular float featured some very tired looking little girls (we were at the end of a very long parade  route!)

This float represented Mexico.

This was the first of the "country" floats. They had floats for each of the Latin American countries.

This, I believe, is Peru.  As you can see there is a very large llama.

This is Argentina. The sun is from their flag. I cheered extra loud for Argentina!!

Probably my favorite float and my picture is hard to see, but this is Ecuador. A volcano spitting fire and smoke on the back of a turtle with glowing eyes.

I think this float had the Carnaval Queen, but it started to be confusing.

The parade went on and on and I began to get fatigued with photo taking. This is another country float. At some point, it became stopped and Phoebe and I were concerned about getting uptown to go home.  We decided to walk up the parade route. It took about an hour to walk a little over a mile, but we walked through the crowd and saw the parade from the street level.

Some people in the crowd wore some of the best costumes!

All in all it was a fantastic night. Now I can't wait for next year!!