Carnival in T&T was great fun! It was my first time being there for Carnival and it was a fantastic experience, plus I somehow didn't get sunburned. Things didn't start off so hot though, we were flying from SF to Trinidad by way of Miami on American. We got to the airport nice and early for our 6am flight, and as we settled in to some empty seats to wait the last few minutes for the airline counter to open at 4am Danielle gets a phone call. Yes, at 3:50am after we were already at the airport, they called to let us know our flight had been canceled. We had checked the display just a few minutes before, but apparently during those 10 minutes they determined the plane "had a mechanical problem." To make matters even more awesome, some computer inside American somewhere had decided that we should be immediately rebooked for the 6am flight the next day. It sounds logical at first, if one flight is canceled, then the passengers should be rebooked quickly ... but there are only so many flights from Miami to Trinidad, and around Carnival they are full. Since we had been rebooked, we lost our seats on that evenings flight to Port-of-Spain. Even if we had figured out a way to get to Miami in time for the flight, it wouldn't have mattered as we no longer had seats on the final leg.
After an hour and a half of wrangling with phone agents and the ticket counter, we managed to get an itinerary taking off at midnight and getting to Trinidad in time for the evening entertainment we had tickets for. And for our troubles, they gave us $30 in food vouchers. We took a 6am train back to my parents house, but man it would have sucked to spend ~18 extra hours in an airport when you'd already gotten up before 3am! With all of that, it really seemed like they had canceled the flight because there weren't enough passengers ... the mob of highly annoyed tired people was not enough to fill half the plane. That being said, the only thing worse than being at an airport at 4am to find out your flight had been canceled and you were going to be there for a while is probably being a mostly powerless ticket agent at work at 4am trying to deal with some extremely unhappy people whose vacations your company had just ruined ... man there were some angry folks. And one poor lady who was there at 4am opening the counters was still there at 9:30pm when we came back to check in!
So, the beginning of the trip was not so hot, and I didn't really manage to catch up on all the lost sleep and completely screwed up internal clock until after Carnival ...
We were supposed to meet our friend Dinah in Miami and travel down together, but instead she landed in Trinidad without us and was picked up by Danielle's mom. While we were still in the air, Dinah got to check out "Kiddie's Carnival" on Saturday. Here are some pictures Dinah took of what we missed out on ... the costumes for Kiddie's Carnival are more like what the costumes for Carnival would have been like years ago. Now the main carnival costumes are swimsuits augmented with feathers and sequins ...
We arrived Saturday afternoon (instead of Friday evening), just in time for some of Sandra's (Danielle's mom) delicious food before a Calypso show. D had shared lots of Trinidadian music with me over the years, but this was my first chance to see it performed. The show we went to had 5 past winners of the annual Calypso competition, it was great.
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| From Pre-Carnival |
Calypso Rose, a 70+ year old cancer survivor stole the show ... she was belting out her songs, shaking it around the stage, dancing down into the audience. It was kind of unbelievable how she was moving, and she was really good too!
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| From Pre-Carnival |
The last performer was David Rudder, who's written many of the more famous recent Calypsos, including my favorite "Dus' in your face" ...
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| From Pre-Carnival |
Alright, more later on the other days of Carnival.
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