Carnival Weekend

The island is settling down with the end of Carnival last friday, July fourth. The third of July is Emancipation Day, the day in 1848 that the Danish Crown abolished slavery in it's Caribbean colonies, and this is the week that St. John has chosen to hold its carnival celebration every year. Nearly every Caribbean Island has such a celebration, but they are all different, and are held at different times of year. Each year, one week before July 4th, St. John sets up "The Village" in the customs parking lot, across from the NPS Visitor Center, with a big stage and lots of little stands that sell all kinds of local food and drinks. Every night its full of people listening to local reggae music and eating conch fritters and johnny cakes. Jouvet is the big event for July 3rd. Theoretically it starts at 4am, although in my four years here it has never started on time. This year was no exception. Jessica, Adrian and I wore our "carnival dresses" (Jess and I both chose black this year, Adrian went with a booty-liscious paisley number), and, sporting the light-up jelly rings that Jessica picked up for all of us girls, we, along with Hannah, John, Ryan and Dale, bounced between the Village, Front Yard (It's final night!) and Larry's Landing until about 5:30 am when Dale and I dragged our sorry carcasses off to bed, Jouvet still not begun, except for a small steel drum band that marched on its own, apparently as impatient as the rest of us. In the end we didn't see jouvet as it did not start until 7am this year...

The Front Yard is a local bar that is this little shack next door to the police station, with a gravel parking (the front yard) with an extra little bar out there, and plenty of space for people to dance and drink. For years it has been a favorite of the SU students who have found their way down to this rock. For its last night the Low Down Throw Down- a reggae-blue grass-rock band, fronted by a semi-local who used to play for a local favorite called Hatch- played until sun-up, and then until the last person had wandered off to watch Jouvet.

11 am is when the big July 4th parade is scheduled to begin; we met up with my friend from Syracuse, Christian, who is excavating in Charlotte Amalie at the Megan-Pedersen House, and his friend Kevin who was visiting from the states, at Mongoose Junction where the parade begins. At about 12:30 Christian, Kevin, Dale and I saw the opening of the parade as Miss St. John was ferried past on the back of an El Camino. It was another 20 minutes before the next group went- it was the "Middle Aged Majorettes", women of a certain age wearing long t-shirts sporting air-brushed, bikini clad torsos and blue wigs, mardi gras beads, and flinging batons. The parade was incredible- it consists of people getting troupes together to dance and perform. There were a number of actual dance and majorette groups, school groups from St. Thomas and St. John; a man in a butterfly costume with wings that had to span 20 feet; and the "mocko jumbies", people marching and dancing on stilts that make them 30 feet tall. It lasted until about 4pm, when the last flat-bed truck with a local band singing the "jouvet song" pulled into line. Dale and I hiked to the beach as all the roads were closed, and got a few minutes of swimming in; by the time we made it back into town that last truck was just finishing its triumphal ride from Mongoose Junction to somewhere around Dolphin Market. That evening we watched the fireworks from my front porch as they were launched from a barge in Cruz Bay Harbor, and shuffled off to bed early as we hadn't slept much in nearly two days.

The rest of the weekend we took it easy, heavy rains keeping us from the beach until early afternoon on Saturday. Sunday Dale and I hiked the Reef Bay Trail, eating lunch at the petroglyphs before heading straight up to Centerline Road. On the way home we stopped at Hawksnest Beach and had a cook out with Jess, John, Ryan, Kenda and Eli. I finally saw my first lobster while snorkeling- a good sized guy with a 6" carapace hiding in a coral skeleton. Dale and I ended carnival weekend with another early night, ready to get back to work the next day...after a morning of diving at Whistling Cay.