Carnival

This year I spent carnival in Maastricht. Apparently, in the north of Holland are the reserved Protestants and in the south are the crazy Catholics. So if you want to celebrate carnival, you go south. We went as far south as one can get in Holland, to Maastricht, which is almost on both the Belgium and German borders. Being a Jew from the great white north (OK, I know that's more of a description of Canada than Chicago but with this weeks snow it can share the claim), I'm still getting used to this carnival thing. It's kind of a mix of Halloween and St. Patrick's Day.

Maastricht is two and a half hours away. So we left here early on Sunday morning (early being relative for a Sunday morning). We arrived in Maastricht around noon and headed straight to the center of town. Everyone was in costume. Everyone except for us. I had nice lei, and later on splurged on a wig, but it was too cold to wear anything but a down jacket, lined pants, and comfortable shoes.

There were two things about the Dutch carnival that surprised me (contrasts with last year in Venice). First, there were families in Maastricht. Most people were in groups of a dozen to 20 where everyone had matching costumes (Smurfs, the Chinese pingpong team, hippies, etc), but also there was just mom, dad, and kids all dressed alike. Considering my second observation, I really didn't expect carnival to be a family day. I don't recall seeing any children in Venice.

Now for the second observation. There was beer. Of course. But it was served in glasses. I guess the premise is that even when the Dutch drink, they are responsible enough not to throw the glasses on the ground (or at each other) but return them to the bar when they are done. At Duke when we had bonfires, the deans walked around handing out plastic cups, at Cubs games you get plastic cups, even at bars in the US you sometimes get plastic cups. But in Holland you get decent cheap beer from the tap in real glasses. And in the main square and on the streets we saw waiters walking around with trays to retrieve glasses that were left out. Usually the trays were almost empty.

We watched the parade in the afternoon and only stayed until dark, since none of us were really in the mood to stand outside drinking beer all night. The parade was nice, but very long and it didn't hold our attention for the hours that it went on. Except I really liked this troupe, the costumes were great, as was the music. For a moment I even believed that bikini and feather clad girls would suddenly samba on over. But they did not.



Maybe next year will be in Brazil. Or Cuenca.