The first thing on the itinerary was the Pregón y Elección de los dioses (Opening and Selection of the gods). Ok, so I had no idea what that even meant or entailed, so I was intrigued. A friend and I caught the bus to the centro since that first night’s event was going to take place in the Plaza de la Constitución. While we were walking in the direction of the carnival we were met with crowds of people. All around us people were dressed in costumes of all kinds and everyone was walking the streets and just having a good time. On one corner we saw group of guys all dressed in costumes and playing musical instruments while people gathered around to join them in singing and to cheer them on. They looked like green aliens…or could they have been broccoli heads?? Who knows…but I just had to stop and take a picture with them (I never leave home without my camera). As we continued towards the plaza, the atmosphere was super charged. It was loud with the roar of the crowds of people. So this was the Málaga carnival. The crowd became thicker as we approached and we had to wiggle our way through some people, but it didn’t bother me one bit! I actually liked being in the center of all the action J. In the plaza they had set up a stage and a huge, long red carpet. We got there just before the Elección de los dioses began. Different groups or designers constructed these huge and elaborate costumes (that they called “dioses”) that were made of feathers, glitter, lights and sequins. The “dioses” would come out and parade their costume on the red carpet for the crowd to enjoy and then at the end of the night they picked a winner. It was great - I felt like I was back home in St. Maarten! The only thing that was missing was the Calypso and Soca music. But, wow. It was more like West Indian carnival than I realized! Actually, back home we construct our costumes the exact same way and have shows like this too. Even though I knew that the concept of carnival in the West Indies and in Europe was the same, I didn’t realize that modern day Spanish carnival would be so similar. 
The next day the festivities continued. Sunday was the Gran Desfile (The grand parade). A group of friends and I took the bus down to the Avenida de Andalucia, where the parade was to pass through. That day was even more fun than the night before. Not only were more people dressed up, little kids had on their costumes too. I had so much fun taking pictures of them. The cutest costume I saw was this little girl (who was white) who was dressed up as the princess from the recent Disney movie “Princess and the Frog.” She wore the green princess dress and held a stuffed frog, but since the princess from the movie was black, her face was painted brown. It was cute, but I had to laugh. We enjoyed the parade, which basically consisted of the dioses we had seen the night before and the level of excitement was just as high. Besides the costumes, the thing I enjoyed most about the parade was all the confetti. As the groups passed by, lots of people had bags of confetti and were tossing handfuls into the crowd. Somehow we must have attracted a lot of attention with our enthusiasm because it seemed as if every handful of confetti was thrown directly at us. LOL. I was finding confetti for days afterwards. The carnival was such a great cultural experience. Everyone who participated seemed to have had such a great time. I did too.
que fiesta!! carnaval!!
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