Can You Guess Where I Am?

Caribana.  This is a typical costume.  You can’t see them, but there are little wheels to take some of the weight off the people wearing them, called “Mas Players”.  

This year was the festival’s 41st, and the 1.3 million visitors make it North America’s largest street festival.august 2 2008

The parade is the big draw, that’s where I am here.  And it turns out that if you want to participate in the parade all you have to do is walk into it.  So I took off and was bopping along and then, for the first time ever, I got crowd-swept.  

It was nothing malicious… just a packed street, one of the Mas Players veered left and all of a sudden I too was going left, in mid-air.  I used to think, “how in the world can you fall down like that and get trampled by a crowd?”.  I take it all back.
 
 
These are the friends I went with.  See the guy in the glasses?  And the one beside me?  That’s Chris and Jim who are Hoax Couture, one of Canada’s most prestigious fashion houses.  I met them through a mutual friend back at the start of the year.  

They’ve been really good to me, introduced me to all their friends and generally kept an eye out on the new-to-town girl.  They even made me some clothes, the “4 Essential Pieces Every Girl Needs in her Wardrobe”.  

Now, I have footage of that exploration from start to completion, 10 hours of it.  And try as I may (I have at least 15 Final Cut file attempts) I can’t seem to piece this episode together.  And I feel like a complete douche because of this… “thanks for being great to me guys, I’ll just be over here, sitting on your footage”.