Weekend Adventure: Carnaval Adventure

Hello all!  Southern Holland, like many other countries, celebrated Carnaval this Friday-Tuesday.  Almost every storefront in Tilburg was decorated in the town colors, bright green and orange.  The city center becomes the new home of food trucks, multiple small marching bands, and colorfully costumed people.  The street with all of the bars/clubs/pubs (whatever you call them) is crazy.  From Friday-Tuesday people drink all day long outside the bars, which have newly added on outdoor space and decorations.  They have special carnaval wooden boards that they put up, as well as special bars outside of the bars so you don't even have to go inside.  The craziest thing though, is that entire families - I'm talking strollers to wheelchairs - go in to the bars.  Being American, this was probably the biggest shock to me.  While the party goes on all weekend, each city has a special day where they put on a big parade.  Me and "the lads" from my floor took a daytrip to Breda to see their parade.  Now, Breda is a small city like Tilburg that had a small (I thought it was a pretty large parade compared to Rome, GA) parade, butttttt the ticket price to Breda was much smaller than to other cities.  All in all, it was a great weekend!

Approaching the bar street in Tilburg.  Everyone dresses up here.  Also, Carnaval during the day time (at least where I went) seemed to be very popular with the 35+ crowd.

A pastry from a food truck.

Small parade in Tilburg.  This is their town mascot...it's a man carrying a jug of urine.  Tilburg used to be a very large textile producing city...and they cleaned the textiles with ammonia, and a cheap way to get ammonia is from urine..yeah.

Day trip to Breda:  when Emily becomes semi-inducted as "one of the lads"

much bigger floats than in the Rome Christmas parade ;)

all kinds of costumes

also, all kinds of things in the parade!

even drums in wheelchairs?

These are what the storefronts look like with added decorations.