A month or so before the Friday before Fat Tuesday, which itself is 46 days before Easter (you follow all that? If not, here's a good explanation for why Easter changes every year - a hint: it's based on crazy pagan traditions like the sun and moon...) singing groups compete in four different categories to pass through to the semifinals and eventually the finals of a giant competition. The concurso attracts many great songwriters from the region, but few from outside of the province find success due to the appetite for specificity among the audience. Many non-gaditano Spaniards do not understand Carnival lyrics (which are often critical of local public figures and can be quite hilarious), so I hardly bothered to try.
The concurso starts in early February with nightly competitions in the Gran Teatro Falla, and lasts until the aforementioned Friday, when it culminates in an all-night finale (literally - it ended at 8:30 am this year) featuring the lucky groups to have survived the two stages of elimination. But that night is not the hit-the-street crazy affair one might think it is: instead, every faithful and true-blooded gaditano watches the competition at home, on TV, with family, friends, wine and a lot of food. The best comparison I can make is it's like the Super Bowl, but it starts at 11:30 pm.
The craziness starts the next night, with the fiesta de las disfraces, or costume party. Unlike Carnavale in Venice, where costumes are ornate, participants are masked, and behavior is civil, the costume party here best resembled those in the Dartmouth fraternity basements on Halloween. Beer, pieces of costumes, broken bottles, and other sticky substances coated the alley streets until the next morning. Costumes were often anything you could put your hands on, and groups of 10 or more dressed identically were common. Best I saw? Italian Mafia members who staged a shootout across the street with a rival gang. I never imagined I could see so many people in these small streets at once. One gaditana I know said there were a million people here that weekend. In a town of normally 160,000, that's un montón de gente.
Being a festival, there were booths and temporary eateries sprinkled throughout the town, and this led to the discovery of buñuelos which, although they were nothing more than freshly fried donuts, could be combined with chocolate and powdered sugar to make a delectable treat. Let's just say it made braving the crowds worth it, and I became slightly obsessed.
Cadiz doesn't have that much to see, and it is often covered in a day or less by backpackers. The two major sights to see are the mayhemic mercado central that drawfs the infamous Rialto Market in Venice in both areal size and sheer mass of fresh food, and the half Baroque/half neo-classical Cathedral. However, despite living here and having two and a half days, I managed to not take Becka to either of them. This sheer choke has inspired me to create a list of the top 10 chokes on my trip. Obviously the rugs will be added to that list as well. That will appear shortly.
We did, however, eat cheaply and well, and Becka fell in love with tapas, which in theory, are cheap (~1.50-2€) small plates of food (4 will fill most Europeans, Americans need closer to 6) that you sample with others often standing up. Some American restaurants have taken advantage of the novelty of this idea by serving small amounts of food but for large plate prices, but here, for the most part, they're still cheap.
Cádiz was both a pleasant introduction to Europe for Becka and a nice way to start our trip peacefully and comfortably. After waking up at 6am to catch our 7pm flight to Venice (yes you read that right - we had to get to London to catch the Venitian flight; it wasn't a transfer) and making it to Sevilla, we started playing the waiting game...
