Notting Hill Carnival has come and gone for another year. Actually, it happened a while back, on the long weekend at the end of August. Last year we went away for most of the long weekend, returning on the Monday afternoon to catch the tail end of the carnival. This year we decided to stay for the whole thing.

On the Sunday, the carnival celebrates children's day when only kids under the age of 16 are allowed to participate in the parade. The kids were very cute in their costumes.


Everything else about the Sunday is the same as Carnival Monday though. Hordes of people still turn up to watch and there is lots of drinking happening on the streets. Personally I think that if the organisers were keen to actually make children's day for the children then they should make the day alcohol free. I guess the logistics of this might be impossible though.

Carnival's main event takes place on Monday. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people flock to Notting Hill to drink, party and watch the parade. 2009 was no exception. Our suburb was packed with people.

On Monday morning, Andrew, Natalie, Gemma, Dino and I went to the beginning of the parade route to watch some of the parade. The judging for the best float happens here at the beginning of the route. We figured that this was the best place to check out the floats when they were at their best.

I liked the Samba school floats most of all. They were very colourful and very elaborate. There were lots of feathers and sequins.


Or sometimes, there wasn't much at all. Two girls from the Paraiso School of Samba had nothing on except body paint and a bejewelled modesty patch. I think that they were very brave considering how rowdy the carnival crowds can get. When we saw the float pass our house later that day, the girls were riding on one of the floats and they had a ring of protectors around them.

This year, there wasn't the violent end to carnival that there had been last year. Last year there was a riot out the front of our house (I blogged about it and we have some closeup photos of the action). Although, this year Andrew and I saw gangs of hoodies pocketing glass bottles (I guess to be used as missiles later on) the police seemed to keep it under control. They were able to prevent a mass riot from happening.

Even though we've lived here for 3 years this is the first year that we've managed to do Carnival. I don't think we need to do it again. It was lots of fun, but for us there was no escape. Everyone else gets to go home when they've had enough of the crowds and the loud music. We live on the parade route so we get the FULL carnival experience from start to finish. I think once was enough for us. We might take advantage of the long weekend and go away for the next carnival.

Tips for Carnival:

• Do you like crowds? If you don't, then carnival is not for you. The place is packed and sometimes you are completely surrounded by people and have no escape route. If you still want to experience carnival without the crazy crowds, come earlier in the day. It's not too bad at around lunch time on the Monday. Children's Day on the Sunday is also a little less crowded.
  
  
• After a hard day of drinking, the crowds start to get very rowdy. Carnival starts to feel unsafe as the evening approaches so I'd aim to leave before sun down. If there is going to be violence, you really don't want to be caught up in the police action or hit by a flying bottle.
  
  
• The crowds at Carnival are a perfect haven for thieves so you have to be very careful with your belongings. A couple of years ago, Gemma had her purse cleaned out by opportunistic pickpockets. I always find that my Hedgren bag is perfect for these sorts of situations. It has an across the body strap and it sits on my hip. If I'm walking through a crowded area I often place my hand on the bag as further protection.
  
  You might also want to consider tucking a 20 pound note into your bra or undies for just-in-casings. Disastrously, when Gemma had her money and phone stolen, she then lost her friends in the crowd. Poor Gemma had no way of getting home so she had to walk.
  
  
• If you're interested in taking photos of the day, the best place to be is at the very beginning of the parade route before the judging happens. This is actually the marshalling area for the floats so technically you aren't allowed to hang around in this area to watch. But, we found that if you have a Digital SLR (read: impressive looking camera) the security guards just assumed that you were media and didn't shoo you away. Of course, neither Gemma or I had a DSLR on the day so we pretended to be photographer's assistants. We made sure that our photographers were properly hydrated and important stuff like that.

Hrm, my tips don't make it sound like very much fun, do they? It is fun! Maybe just not my cup of tea.

More photos from the Children's Carnival and Carnival Monday on Flickr.

Every year, the Notting Hill Carnival is held on the August bank holiday weekend. It is a Caribbean flavoured festival and is the second biggest street festival in the world (after Rio). The parade route goes right past our front door and we had a fantastic view from our living room window.

Well, we had a fantastic view once we arrived home. We tried to cram it in all in to our bank holiday weekend. We organised a last minute a trip to Scotland (the purposes of which were not entirely recreational... more to come) and when booking our flights home we decided to try and catch the tail end of carnival Monday.

Getting home mid-carnival was a bit of a challenge. Ladbroke Grove, our closest tube station was closed and thousands of people were using Notting Hill Gate tube station. We decided to tube it to Holland Park, which is a little further afield and hoof it. Walking down the hill from Holland Park to our house we had a fantastic view of the carnival in full swing. All you could see was a sea of people bobbing up and down to a Caribbean beat.

This view was a little stressing to us as we knew we had to wade through that crowd to get home. Poor Andrew was dragging our rollie luggage which was not an easy feat. We got a few strange looks and I'm sure most people were wondering what kind of idiot brings luggage to a street party. Eventually we made it to our front door, stepped over the pile of rubbish that had accumulated on our door step and retreated to sanity.

We spent the rest of the afternoon hanging out our window watching the parade go by and bopping to the music. Parade is a very loose term as there wasn't a steady stream of floats. There also weren't any barriers preventing the crowd from getting up close and personal. Floats would go by every now and then with a mobile crowd attached. It seemed that carnival goers would pick a float they liked and follow the parade route with the float.


Sea of people is the right metaphor to describe the crowd, as there were definitely waves of people. Sometimes we wouldn't be able to see the road outside because of the number of people and sometimes there'd only be 50 or so revellers outside. I think it was a great way to do the parade. It gave people an escape route from the madness. I don't think the Grove's narrow streets would deal with a traditional parade.


Seven o'clock arrived, the official finishing time, and floats were still going by our house. An hour later, floats were still going past and a line down the road showed that there were several more to come. I think they were doing laps of the route. Sadly, at around 9:30pm, the happy, dancing crowd turned in to an angry, bottle-throwing mob. A group of young boys started throwing bottles at the police and all hell broke loose. It was a sad end to a really fun day.

The police response was aggressive. Large groups of police officers raced up our street and formed human barriers. They created several lines across Ladbroke Grove, some lines pushed the crowd north and others pushed the crowd south. Effectively, they squeezed the crowd out of Notting Hill. There were hundreds of police officers dressed in fluorescent yellow parkas outside our house.


Andrew and I watched the police operation from our window while we ate our dinner. It was dinner and a show! A group of kids loitered around 40m away from the police line. Every now and again a boy would dart out from the safety of the group and pelt a bottle at the police line. The police weren't wearing any protective clothing apart from parkas and bobby hats. I'm surprised that more of them weren't injured by flying glass. (The papers say that only one officer was injured.)


We watched until stray missiles started to crash on our window ledge. We then drew our blinds and turned off our living room lights. Every now and again I'd peek out to see what was going on. I saw the arrival of the riot police but not the action. At around 11:30pm, Andrew and I went to bed to the sounds of helicopters and police sirens. Luckily, our sound-proofing is quite good so it was no more than a distant buzz.

This morning I woke up expecting to see the after-math and was greeted with clean streets. Gone was the carpet of rubbish and all the shattered glass. Shops that had wisely boarded up their windows for the carnival had taken down the coverings and were now open for business. The organisers/council had done a very impressive job on the clean up.

More photos on Flickr...