Carnival Monday - Playing Mas with Harts

Today is Carnival Monday and it is the dress rehearsal for tomorrow when the real judging occurs. Here in Trinidad - Carnival is a participatory activity. I haven't been to Mardi Gras in New Orleans but I think there are big floats and lots of people watching the parades. Here there are very, very few spectators because nearly everyone is a participant. Participating is called "playing mas" (mas is short for masquerade). You join a "band" and buy a costume. We are in Harts - which is celebrating its 50th anniversary. Each band dances around the city accompanied by music trucks with enormous speakers, some live music, trucks dispensing drinks and lots of security. At various points the trucks stop but the dancing continues.



The bands vary in size from a hundred to fifteen hundred. Harts is one of larger bands and so it comes with "wee wee trucks" as well - port-a-potties on a flat bed truck.



One of Trinidad's security feature is a blimp which flies over the city. We've been told it has some kind of infrared feature - but we still don't understand how it fights crime.



Music truck. Each year, several songs compete for the "song of Carnival" - and these dozen or so songs are played throughout the day - repeated. My current ear worm is the "You're out all day; every night you're out" and Dan's is "Who's playing mas - everyone's playing mas." Or at least we think these are the lyrics. We were awoken in the middle of the night with a song that we thought was about pieces of pie but today we realized today the lyrics are in fact "Right now I selling pipe. How much inches of pipe yuh want?"