Cádiz for Carnaval!!!

So I really need to start to write these things right after I do things as I've already begun to forget things. I will once again preface this by saying most of these pictures I have once again stolen from friends in the program as I don't bring my camera most places to avoid it being stolen. Nothing much new happened the week after my trip to Bilbao, and Thursday night we took the 11:55 bus out of Salamanca for another weekend trip, this time to a small city on the southern shore of Spain called Cádiz. It was supposedly the best city in Spain to go to for Carnaval so we figured we'd give it a shot.

After an almost 8 hour bus ride with very little sleep, we arrived in Cádiz as the sun was rising. We started wondering over to the train station as our hotels were in Jerez de la Frontera, a city about 45 mins outside of Cádiz. On our walk over, we found a random statue and took pictures of it. I'm pretty sure we never figured out what it was, but the picture is below.

We eventually got over to Jerez and discovered that every single street in the city is lined with orange trees which gives it a much different feeling than Salamanca to say the least. The weather was so nice, at least 10 degrees warmer than Salamanca is not more.

We wondered around Jerez for a while as we had to wait until noon to check in to our hotels. We ended up sitting in park, picture below, outside of my hotel for most of it which was beautiful. There were palm trees! And sun!

I think it would be fair to say that by the time we actually got into our rooms, we were all incredibly exhausted. We ate a quick, typical travel lunch, 50 cent Carrefour bread with 1 euro Carrefour chorizo. Nice and cheap. That nap that ensued lasted until about 5. We originally planned on leaving for Cádiz about 6:30 to get there early enough to avoid tons of people. However, the girls had to get ready, and as Lindsey cleverly titled the night "Pre-game = game = game over". By the time we got to Cádiz, a couple people had to be brought back to the hotel which cut our numbers by about half. We met up with one of Tyler's high school friends who was studying in Cádiz for the whole year. She was nice enough to show us around the city for the night which was decorated with tons of lights like the ones below on every street. We went to a few bars and did a lot of wondering around the city and ended up sitting on the beach for a while which was really nice. At this point we were under the impression that Carnaval was not as crazy as we were led on to believe.

We got back to our hotel about 8 that morning due to inconvinient train schedules and slept most of the day. We made it back out to Cadiz around 5 pm with the plan of hanging out for a few hours then heading back to Jerez as more than one 8 am night gets very difficult to do. When we got there, we unfortunately realized that was the night to go out. The city was packed, completely. This picture was taken in the main plaza, before most people even got there.

We walked over to the shore behind the cathedral and sat there for a while and watched the sun set while debating what to do with our night. In the end we stuck to out plan of going home, mostly because we were severly lacking in energy compared to the rest of the crowd, which supposedly was more than twice the population of the actual city due to all the people who go just for Carnaval.


We made it back to the main plaza as it really started to fill up, mostly lacking in costume unfortunately. It was still really fun and we some some crazy costumes. It was also interesting to see how the lack of a concept of political correctness shows through in costumes.

The picture below I included because we were standing next to this guy for most the night who was trying to sell us a kazoo-thing that you keep inside of your mouth all night. Very strange man, he was there the next morning too...

We had a early night that night, but made it back into Cádiz by noon the next day to enjoy the more family-friendly activities that carnaval has to offer. The main attraction at Cádiz's carnaval is groups of singers, mostly men, who ride around the streets on tractors and sing funny songs about events of the past year.

One of the guys who went on the trip found some Spaniards that invited him to their beach house a half hour outside of the city. He accepted, but neglected to tell us, and as we checked out of our hotels the next morning, we just packed his stuff up too and hoped that we'd find him somewhere wondering the streets of Cádiz or passed out on a doorstep. Luckily he called about an hour before the bus left to let us know he was on his way back.

The following two pictures are pretty good examples of the state of the city on Sunday afternoon, with a week of carnaval to go... I'd like to emphasize that these were taken at 2 PM, the men in the first picture are about 50 years old, and the guy in the last picture is not dead, though we thought it was a distinct possibility until we saw he breathe.