Carnaval!

I have been to a lot of Salvadoran carnavales and dances, at which I have had a lot of interesting cultural experiences. But I never could have imagined the crazy night in store at the San Miguel Carnaval 2008. Apparently the carnaval in San Miguel, a city about an hour from me, is the second biggest in the world after Rio de Janeiro! Who knew?! All year long my local friends had been bragging about this celebration. But it is a familiar Salvadoran tactic to get really excited and talk up an event for months then when the date finally arrives, everyone spends the whole time acting bored and too cool to have any fun. So despite all the eager anticipation, I wasn’t expecting too much.

We rolled in about 8pm, on a pickup truck overflowing with 19 gringos. We immediately encountered the giant parade and, unable to find a space in the crowd to stand and watch the floats, climbed up on an empty float and danced and waved and pretended like we belonged on a float winding through a rowdy mob estimated to be 1.5 to 2 million people. As the parade entered the heart of the city, the crowd became less family-friendly and more drunk and aggressive, so we abandoned the parade and began dancing. The whole city was closed down and there were 60 stages with live bands set up on almost every block. So we broke into a smaller group of 8 and wandered from stage to stage, dancing and eating street food. Sometime after midnight we ended up in a futbol stadium at one of the biggest concerts in the city, by a reggaeton group (kind of like rap music) called Fido y Alexis. It started out really fun but we were about halfway up in the audience when we noticed people were peeing in beer bottles and hurling them onto the stage and into the crowd. We were already backing out when the crowd started pushing. Then very suddenly, everyone started running. It was a full stampede. I saw four of my friends get knocked down and trampled. All I could do was try not to fall. When I regained control, I found myself outside the stadium all alone. Thankfully I found all of my friends quickly and we were all okay, although those who fell where filthy and a few had footprints stamped on their backs. We saw on TV the next day that the stampede was caused by a fight between some gangs and the riot police. We decided that we’d had enough action for one night and headed back to the pickup. Of our group of 19 people, here was the damage total for the night: 1 robbery, 4 pickpocketings, 2 punchings and countless butt grabbings. But, despite it all, we had a whole lot of fun! I’ll never do it again, but I’m glad I had the experience. I am just going to stick to my simple campo dances where the most dangerous thing is the rickety ferris wheel.