Carnival!

The Carnival parade in Panjim is held on the Saturday of the Carnival week. Every year, we dress up in costume and head down to Top Gear pub where we proceed to ignore the entire parade and instead throw colour, water, eggs, beer and pretty much anything else in easy reach, on each other.

All dressed up and ready to go

Ralph preparing his Coloured Bottles of Doom

My 3 year old nephew, Stephano's, first Carnival!

So we set out, armed and ready, only to find out that the parade had been cancelled (with the floats halfway through the city) due to a tragic accident in a small village in Goa, in which a school bus had fallen into the water and 6 young children had died.

As the elections are coming up next month, our corrupt politicians are doing their best to pretend they care about the population and so they decided to cancel the Carnival celebrations and declare a state of mourning. Personally, I think it was a ridiculous decision after the amount of time and effort spent in preparing for Carnival by all those who built floats for the parade and the others who have travelled from far and wide to see them.

Since we were all there anyway, we decided to continue with our colour throwing as usual....

Alcohol filled water guns

This old man seemed to be having fun even though he didn't really know what was going on

We then had to move because the cops opened the roads once more and we had no place to play.... so we headed to Down The Road, a pub about a kilometer away.

On the bike

Random people dressed for carnival too

And we continued our fun until the cops came by again and shut us down...