Carnival in Nice

Check out all my pictures from the Carnival parade here

Imagine, waking up on a Sunday morning in your own bed! What a concept! Today was the first Sunday since I've been in Europe that I've woken up in my own bed, showered in a familiar shower, and eaten breakfast at the usual breakfast table. It was definitely a nice change of pace, albeit one that's not likely to be continued. However, in keeping with the whole carpe diem, make the most of Europe mentality, today was not to be without its own adventures.

There's a small tour company that pushes a lot of its trips through the program I'm on, and the trip today was a day trip to Nice. Around the world right now it's Carnival time, and Nice has one of the largest and oldest festivals in Europe. So this morning I was up early again, walking 30 minutes towards town for the second morning in a row. I slept for almost the entire two-hour bus ride, and when I woke up we were in Nice! There were a large number of people from my program on the trip, but we split up into groups of five or six and went exploring. It was a totally different feel from last time I was there. The relaxed feel that had saturated the air last time was gone, replaced by a feverish, festive atmosphere.

When we got there we walked around the old city for a bit, got Socca (a Nice local dish. It's like a crepe, but with chick peas in it), got ice cream, and bought fruit at the local market. After sitting on the beach for a bit and enjoying the sun and all the people in costumes, we decided to buy masks and go watch the parade.

They have different Carnival events each day of the week-long festival, but today was one of the last days, and was the grand parade. It was unlike anything I've ever seen before. The floats were absolutely insane. It was like being at Penn State's homecoming parade, but on steroids and ecstasy. The floats are gigantic, and most of them have large moving parts. My favorite was a humongous dinosaur-dragon-thing. It was probably 15 feet high and 40 feet long. Entirely mechanized, there were two men in the bottom working the controls; one to drive the actual float, and the other to operate the head. The entire neck and head moved from side to side, with a smoke machine inside. There was also a girl sitting inside the mouth, attacking the crowd with silly string and confetti. I should mention that there were vendors all over the streets selling confetti and cans of silly string. All the people in the floats have silly string and spray the crowd, and the crowd is only too happy to spray back. People who don't even know each other get into long, drawn-out silly string fights. A 10-year old kid had been spraying my friend Hanna for some time, and I finally got up, bought 4 cans of silly string, and proceeded to empty them all onto this kid, much to the chagrin of his parents. This led to us chasing each other around for a while, attacking each other with confetti, until his parents took him away. Here's another victim of our malice: