Carnival came to Punta Cana for the first time this year. It is usually only in February, every Sunday in February to celebrate Dominican independence. Their actual day of independence is on the 27th of February. We were hoping to go to the carnival parade in La Vega because that is supposed to be the really elaborate one, but we could not figure out how to get there. La Vega is four hours away and it would be expensive to get a hotel for everyone. We also heard a lot of stories about carnival being really scary. People having jewelry stolen off of their body and getting hit by the performers. Luckily we found out that carnival was coming to us. It was definitely a "touristy" carnival because of the location, but it was still amazing. and we still got hit by the performers with these things that looked like balloons. Traditionally they are made out of goat stomachs and filled with rocks. I was hit a multiple times with the "balloons" but it was never too hard. The parade was awesome, there were so many insane costumes. Some of them reminded me of mardi gras costumes and some were really abstract. native american, painted body, bone necklaces, glitter, colors, newspaper costumes. drums and horns. the celebration went all the way into the night and a band began to play. it turned into a concert and everyone was dancing the the street. fireworks were going off and we started to walk to our friend Henry's house. he lives a few blocks from where carvinal was held. we had a cook out at his house, i had grilled corn and a baked potato with salsa. Henry is randomly an amazing magician. He did a magic trick for us where he had me pick a card in front of everyone and show everyone while he was turned around. I put it back in the deck and wrote the card on a napkin, it was the five of diamonds so we wrote "5D". he was stilled turned around and he told us to light the napkin on fire and it turned to ashes in an ashtray. he turned around and picked up some of the ashes and rubbed them on his arm and "5D" appeared on his arm!! another trick he did was someone picked a card, showed us, and put it back in the deck with out Henry looking, then he threw the entire deck against glass door and the correct card appeared on the other side of the glass!!! i really dont know how he did it! I felt like i was watching David Blaine or something.
