Carnaval

This weekend was Carnaval, the Mardi Gras-esque celebration that for some weird reason is largely neglected in the United States. Needless to say, my friends and I wanted to take full advantage of this wild celebration that here in Spain, seems for like Halloween. People dress up in the wildest costumes— men as dirty nurses, Pink Panthers, Smurfs, pirates. The list goes on and on. We were planning on traveling to Cadiz, a coastal town about 8 hours away by bus, but at the last minute ended up changing our minds and deciding to go to Madrid on Friday night and stay in Toledo Saturday night. Madrid was fun of course— us girls had our Carnaval masks and fun colored tights and the guys wore these hideous skeleton masks with neon colored long haired wigs. We ended up just bar hopping a lot in the city and were pretty surprised to find that we were some of the only ones dressed up for the night.

No the case in dear old Toledo. Last night people started packing the streets early in the afternoon to watch a parade, listen to concerts in the plaza and take full advantage of the makeshift bar set up for the night. It was the liveliest I have seen Toledo since New Years eve, and people were absolutely nuts. It was awesome because a ton of our friends stayed here in the city, one key reason being that we have midterms this coming week (what???) Theoretically, there is absolutely no reason I should not have had a blast last night, but one of those overwhelming waves of homesickness and mental exhaustion hit me hard early in the morning. I only stayed out until 3 or so, telling people I was not feeling well (halfway true.) I do love it here, but I am starting to just realize I miss my life back home a lot. Maybe I am just being a huge baby. It's just so ironic that this happened on such a wild when seriously the rest of the world it seemed like was on cloud 9. I need to snap out of this. I am in Europe for a year. Poor poor Katie.