Late Carnival

More than a week ago I noticed an announcement for the carnival celebrations in Leuven.  
What on earth??? I find it strange enough that some cities celebrate carnival in the middle of lent rather than at the start of lent, but celebrating it 30 after Easter totally doesn't make sense.  "Vijgen na Pasen" we say in Dutch. Anyway, the organization in Leuven sure didn't share my opinion since they organized this late Carnival parade previous weekend.

We happened to be spending one of our rare weekends at home and I decided to spend the afternoon shopping downtown.  I had already completely forgotten about the announced carnival , when I noticed some feasant feather hats walking around on the market and all of a sudden we heard a marching band approaching.

Sure enough some bands and a few dozen dressed up people marched by, silently gazed by the handfull people along the road. So was this the biggest anniversary parade that had been announced? How pathetic!
Since I am not at all a carnival fan, I found this sad performance rather amusing. Some beautifully dressed grouped seemed to be escaped from Alice in wonderland, was strolling across the market, not at all disturbed to the fact that a small parade came by in which they were clearly not taking part.


Elsewhere in the city we crossed some historic Gilles in their beautiful UNESCO protected heritage costumes. Those could trigger my admiration rather than mockery.






After I had succeeded my shopping with 2 new dresses and some plant pots, my attention was caught again by some approaching drums .  This time the road was alligned with an interested crowd and some big cars showed up at the end of the street.   Oops, the real parade only started now...that previous handful must have been some kind of pactising test parade or so.  
Anyway this time group after group kept coming , most with big cars, the mandatory horrendous stereotypic carnival music but in lots of colorful costumes.  I had mocked the Leuven Carnival too quickly.









Comments

Brian Miller said…
what? you dont like carnival? ha i love all the sights and sounds...and all the people to watch...really enjoyed your pics...

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