We woke up around nine in the morning for a late breakfast. Once we were done eating it was time to put on all of our layers and finally our costumes for the day’s parade and carnival. I was going dressed as VodnÃk which is a sea monster from Czech fairytales. Basically I dressed up in a lot of green and had a hat with green yarn hair. Once my mom and dad had their costumes on we started our walk down to the pub, but not before stopping to take a picture of me in my beautiful costume. When we got to the pub we took our whole village group picture. Then we slowly started our parade around the whole village as usual. We went to every house and invited them for a dance that evening. As we slowly went around the village, some houses offered snacks and drinks to keep us going all day.
When we had finally made it all the way around the whole village, hours later, we all met back up at the pub. Everyone got together and counted the donations that we had gotten from everyone before we all went to have dinner in the bar. As we ate dinner I talked with some guys from the village, but almost all of them don’t really speak English at all so I got a lot of forced Czech practice as we ate. After dinner we slowly headed back home for an hour before the dance started in the evening.
Once we had changed out of our costumes and into some regular clothes we headed down to the pub for the dance. There was all sorts of music for all kinds of dances. There weren’t quite as many people as there had been at my first village festival, but I was happy to have one big celebration with the whole village before I moved.
Then next morning we were completely exhausted so we all slept in quite late. After breakfast my mom lent me some clothes for the day since we were going to be burning some stuff and I didn’t want my clothes to smell like smoke forever. Once we were changed we went over to their second house and slowly started a small fire. We slowly broke apart all of the branches and bushes in the yard, adding them bit by bit to the fire until after a few hours it was all burnt.
Zora had headed home a little early to start making lunch, and I went home once everything was in the fire. Robert stayed behind to wait until it was all burnt. While we waited for Robert to come home, I packed up my costume from the carnival and walked it down to Dana’s house to give it back to her and thank her for letting me borrow it. As I walked back home I called my friend Maggie before I went inside for lunch.
After lunch I tried to work on my blog for awhile and planed some of my trips that were coming up. Once I got bored of working on my computer I called Audrey for a little while and then finally decided to go to sleep.