March 19, 2011

Carnaval!

Back in October, I realized that Halloween was nothing special here. A scraggly group of ten or so kids came trick-or-treating at the door, and that was it. I wondered if there would be anything like it here.

There was. On the first Wednesday of march, my school celebrated Carnaval. In Uccle, there were no street dances, parties, or anything like that, but people at my school certainly dressed up. Better than Halloween last year at my high school in the United States.

Here are some pictures...






Me. I dressed up as an American tourist-- this photo is before I put on the I London shirt. Ironically, I had to borrow the shorts, the white socks, the fanny pack, and the London shirt...all from Belgians. But I had fun (intentionally) butchering French for a day. It provided a good switch from continually trying to improve my pronounciations. 


Anywhere you went in the school, there were people dressed up.







(Jupiler-- the most popular beer here in Belgium)





...? 





My class:





My host brothers, Quentin and Diego, introduced me to something new with their costumes. 118-218 is a directory number you can call here, and there are TV ads that everyone knows about. They dressed up as the main characters-- cent dix-huit and deux cent dix-huit:



Here's an example of the original publicité:




It reassured me that, yes, other countries besides mine create obnoxious television commercials.

No comments:

Post a Comment