Malta Carnival:
This past weekend was the Malta Carnival, our first one on the island. Though not as big as the Venice or Rio ones, a good time was had by all. This celebration has been ongoing since the 15th century. It was supposedly started by the Knights of St. John (guess they had to keep up with the debauchery of Rome!). It started on Friday and ends tomorrow, just before Lent.
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The grand parade though was on Sunday. We opted to go to the one happening in Valletta/Floriana as it is not only the largest one. It is also the tamest, more family friendly.
Over in Nadur, on our sister island Gozo, there is the risque one. I have a feeling that this one in Valletta becomes a little more so once the sun goes down, but we didn’t stick around for that. I do know that when l walked the dog at 5AM, there were still teenagers and college students just coming back, a group of them even asked me where they could buy beer at that time of the morning (or is it at that time of the night?).
Either way, it gave me quite a laugh! Told them probably from whence they came. Everything closes down at 10PM around here! It is more of a residential neighborhood, despite the fact that it was in the city. Obviously, they were on holiday.
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The island has a population of about 412,000 and l think every single person was there. The bus usually takes 5 minutes from our place, this time it was about a 40 minute ride. We spent roughly 3 hours checking out the floats. There were 30 in total, but l think we only saw 6 or 7. It was that hard to fight through the crowds. I finally figured things out and made sure to follow any woman with a pram, amazing how deadly they can be with those things, people tend to move as they see them barreling down :-).
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Carnival Costumes Malta:
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I imagine things are a lot different in Rio or Venice come carnival time. This was more of a friendly, let’s have fun atmosphere, not the let’s get drunk and behave like idiots :-). Therefore, we enjoyed ourselves. I think we are way past the age of all that foolishness ;-).
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As you can see, the floats are mostly characters from movies. I think that is also different from most carnivals around the world. Each area or little town has a float that they work on for so many months beforehand, as we saw months leading up to the carnival. They seem to be paper mache from what l could see and feel. I can only imagine how much time and effort went into making these gigantic things. You of course had to have a lot of patience to navigate them down the extremely narrow streets of Valletta, and with all the crowds too.
Carnival Floats Malta:
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Since this is a yearly festival, you can keep track of times and schedules here. It is very much a fun day for the whole family.
What do you think of the Malta Carnival? Is it too tame for you 😉 and would prefer the more adult ones with the sexy outfits and lots of drinking?
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Haha! That looks awesome!
It was fun! It was just too crowded to reach the other floats..maybe next year!
Somehow I have managed to get this far in life and never see a Carnival parade. Must rectify this oversight at some point. Awesome pics of the parade in Malta!
It was my first one too..one more thing crossed off my list.. ;0)
This looks so amazing! I love the colorful and funny floats and just like Justin, I’ve never been to a carnival. Good it was a bit cloudy, otherwise the thirst of the people there would’ve been even bigger :))
It was a lot of fun. So glad we made it as it had rained a little in the morning and l was already backing out, but then the sun snuck in.
Wow , those floats look great. Can you imagine how much time it must have taken to create those? They look eerily similar to the floats created for the Fallas celebration in Valencia, Spain (which I think are coming up in a couple of weeks). I don’t suppose they load these up with fireworks and burn these down in the middle of the plazas though, eh?
Good stuff, Kemkem.
Looks like we are going to have to make time to see the Fallas one next year then as l really enjoyed it. Nope, they did not burn them down. That being said, we weren’t there at night, so who knows? Malta loves their fireworks!!! We kept wondering how much time and care went into building those too. Insane!!!!
Thanks for checking out my blog! I love your blog as well, I was contemplating taking a visit to Malta solo as my sweetie has to work. Please email me if you can spare a few minutes for questions: kaybem@yahoo.com
Thanks for the compliment! I think you would really like Malta. I will email you tomorrow and you can ask me anything you want. Glad you came by!!!