In January I was chatting with a friend of mine and I asked him if he likes Carnival which he replied that no and that maybe it was in part due to the fact that he is not fan of Brazilian music…
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It was then that I decided to attend the Carnival in Rijeka (the biggest and most popular Carnival in Croatia) because it just came to my mind that for sure in Croatia they don’t listen to Brazilian music, so I had to see and experience a Carnival without Brazilian music… So I went :)
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I got there on Saturday, went to do sightseeing under rain and after dinner we went to a concert inside an improvised tend. Until then everything was fine but that concert finished and we went to another one outdoors with 4ºC of temperature and wind! The place was not full but there were a lot of people dancing and having fun… I don’t understand how they can…
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On Sunday morning (Carnival and Parade day) we woke up at 9am and at 10am I had a cultural shock or whatever you want to call it.
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Basically what happens is that AIESEC people join and create a group, there is an organization that arranges the dresses and everything, you just need to go with the flow, so I didn’t have any clue of what was going to happen. Rijeka’s VP TM just told me “Come, you can stay over my place and we will take care of you” (thanks Zana!). And for me that was enough so I didn’t even made many questions, I only knew we were going on a parade dressed as bees.
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So, after getting dressed everyone started to drink wine with coca-cola at 10am on a Sunday... I thought I couldn’t do it, but I did…
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Then we went to the streets and I started to get into the Carnival atmosphere. First we went to take the Millennium Photo: everyone that goes in the parade joins and they take a photo from a derrick (Rijeka has the biggest port from whole Croatia and it’s a very industrialized city).
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And also another interesting characteristic of this Carnival is that the groups that go in the parade are all friends that invite other friends and those friends invite other friends and together they become huge groups that just pick a theme and dress according to it.
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Meanwhile, everyone drinks and the only rule is that TV cannot record people drinking in the parade. So people invent ways to hide the drinks within the disguises…
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In the meantime we had to wait for our turn (it took us 4 hours) so meanwhile we danced, we drinked, we meet other people. It was amazing!
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Thus when our turn came we were very ready :) During the parade we passed by various stages and all of them presented us: AIESEC Rijeka group with people from many places (Portugala heheh) and even with the rain, we didn’t mind at all:
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When the parade was over for us, everyone was dying, we went to the improvised tend to have a meal that the organization provided and most of people stayed there dancing and partying.
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Some of us went home, me included… I felt like if I went out for clubbing and had a really hard party time. And later we came back but it was too late. There are other traditions in this Carnival that I missed, for example, they burn at sea a pust to scare away bad luck :)
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On Monday I also had opportunity to do some sightseeing and we went to visit Trsat Sanctuary and the Trsat Castle which has a great view over the city.
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So, to conclude I missed a little bit the Brazilian music but most of the time I didn’t even remembered that. It was just great and different. I loved it.
I will repeat next year, for sure :)
And I also had the chance to meet again Sanda, the part-time MC member that studies and lives in Osijek :)
After Osijek we travelled to Varazdin, a city in the North of Zagreb. I had a lot of experiences there, like riding a bike (which I haven’t done for years), sharing a sofa with Geet and Alex (which I don’t want to repeat) :
And also I got a serious virus in my laptop, so after returning to Zagreb I’ve spend two days doing backup of all my files and restoring the system (I don’t wish this no anyone). 
And going out, have some beers, the usual. 
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