A ladybug and a ninja go to Carnival

The title of the post sounds a little like the beginning of a punch line, and before we arrived at carnival we thought it might be one big joke on us. When living in a foreign country you tend to put a lot of trust in others. We've often asked new local friends about recommendations on where to eat or get certain things. Generally the recommendations are great (we finally found a good Chinese food restaurant) but sometimes the recommendations aren't quite our style (somebody once recommended a restaurant because it has really good horse, and while I respect that horse is common here I'm not ready). So when one of our Belgian friends invited us to carnival we put our trust in him.

Based on what our friend told us carnival is aligned to Lent (similar to Mardi Gras), it last three days and in the town of Aalst where we went to carnival men mostly dress up as women. The story as I know it is that back in the day the town was actually pretty poor, so they had no money for costumes and instead wore their women's clothes as costumes. This tradition has carried through the generations.

This celebration isn't carried all through Belgium and if we had stayed in Brussels we wouldn't have seen any indication it was really going on. This is maybe why I got a little nervous while riding the train. Our friend said there would be others on the train dressed up but as we boarded it was just the four of us, one ladybug, one ninja, and two men in dresses. However, I shouldn't have doubted our friend, I should have known a person who makes the very best Belgian stew we've ever had (just in case your reading friend) would never lead us astray. Two train stops later and we had arrived at carnival.

I've never been to a New Orleans Mardi Gras, but I image this is similar to what carnival was like. The whole town is transformed to celebrate carnival, there are food vendors everywhere and a huge parade that goes on from about 1pm and was still going on when we left around 10pm. The floats are incredibly impressive and well coordinated. They also tend to be politically charged, mocking the government, the European union or other countries in the union.

For carnival, the costumes are as varied as they are for an American Halloween, it's not just the medieval type costumes. You see cats, pirates etc. You also see a lot of men dressed as women. These men take the tradition seriously. The environment is a lot of fun and the people at carnival are very friendly, we even made some new friends that night. The friendliness might also be why I didn't see any police officers around. From my understanding they don't have issues with fights or violence. They also don't seem to have many issues with alcohol poisoning.

I think carnival is one of those events that you really have to be at to understand. I also suspect that it gets crazier as the night goes on, as Steve and I were on the 11pm train back to our car we could see people just arriving for the celebrations.