Carnival Party & Mardi Gras BE Style

When someone said they celebrate Carnival here in Belgium, I got all excited...thinking of the rigid festooned feathered costumes and beaded bodies of New Orleans...exotic bird costumes, masks with sequins, lots of jazz music and parties. Well, everything has its own twist here in Brussels, so of course it wasn't as anticipated. Here's how it panned out:

Thursday afternoon, the principal got on the blower and said that Friday was a normal uniform day if kids didn't come in costume, so virtually all 411 kids the next day got dressed up, but many were indistinguishable from those kids I'm used to teaching in Canada: skater dude garb or sports jerseys over jeans or madonna-like layers of bright colours and big hairdos...this was carnival? Here's a picture to show you my kids in our classroom--we have a basketball coach, a Mexican fruit picker, a ballet dancer with incognito glasses, "Laura Ingles", a Disney princess, a Chicago-1970's afro bedecked boy with a-peace-love costume and those were the ones I could identify...the rest of the school was also decked out and this made for a fun parade into the middle and highschools, and celebration of the last day before the week off for skiing. We had a party in the afternoon with the whole school in the cafeteria and then games in our room to while away the last half hour.

Another way I know I'm in a different league than in Thorncliffe Park (Toronto) when I polled the kids to find out what they're doing for the mid-winter break: here are just a few destinations planned:

Swiss Alps for skiing
New York City to tour the sites
Egypt, Cairo (this boy is taking an extra week after skiing first with his family in Austria)
Paris (just to go shopping)
South of France to open their summer cottage
Ardennes Chalet to cross-country ski

...and I'll be lucky to get to the Antwerpen Zoo for a day trip! At least I can enjoy the daffodils and tulips coming up in my garden, the lemon-green buds sprouting everywhere on the prolific rosebushes outside my living room window and the morning larks having singing contests in the garden as we anticipate an early spring and a lovely awakening of our adopted surroundings...sorry to rub it in when I know the Nor-Easterns dumped 20 cm of snow on Ontario last week!