Hundreds of thousands of people in the street, a parade of floats, and groups of police patrolling the streets of London can only mean one thing… the Notting Hill Carnival. This weekend, London put on its best and brightest weather to welcome at least one million people over two days to the streets of the Notting Hill district. Five words probably best encompass the essence of the carnival – People, Music, Food, Drink and Rubbish.
The carnival originally started as a way for the Afro-Caribbean community to celebrate and promote its roots and continues to grow each year. Reggae music plays a major part in the carnival, with plenty of the floats blasting it into the crowd, but the variety of music reaches far beyond it today. These days dozens of stalls and stages host people and DJs playing a wide variety of R&B, Hip Hop, Breaks, House and Drum ‘N’ Bass (at least from what I saw). Pictures cannot capture the madness in the streets, with the closest thing I have seen being Halloween on the streets of San Francisco.
Once you push (or get pushed) past the crowds of people and have some breathing space, you might find yourself in veils of smoke. Besides the obvious kind you find at most festivals, it also could mean you stumbled across the many food stalls lined up all over the place. “Jerk”-style food is abundant with BBQs in a barrel on almost every corner. You can also find a number of other food vendors there, serving other traditional and not-so-traditional Caribbean food. Even the bars and clubs get in on the act, with outdoor bars set up just outside building premises. With all this food and drink being consumed, you might expect quite a lot of rubbish and you wouldn’t be wrong. Bins are hard to find these days in safety-conscious London, resulting in giant piles of rubbish. Add, to that, the traffic and wind that blows through the streets and you can imagine what the streets look like at the end of the day.
All in all it is an amazing atmosphere to just walk around but you’ll find that getting into the heart of the carnival is actually the easy part. It is at the end of the day when the tube remains closed and the swarms of people return to wherever they came from, where you really have to fight your way out. Be prepared for a long walk, or least a long queue if you don’t leave early.
It always boggles my mind as to how they clean up that type of rubbish. And then, where does it go? When we were in Boston, we saw the remains of a weekend market, where (seemingly) people were encouraged to just dump their rubbish on the street. Afterwards, huge bulldozers just came in and scraped it all up. Can’t be too flash for the roads, but I guess it’s efficient.
It’s amazing over here. They hire people to who constantly go around sweeping up rubbish from the streets.
It’s good though. At least when I walk into work of a morning I don’t see the millions of cigarette butts on the ground that accumulate throughout the day.
Yeah, I am amazed by how clean such a busy town as London is, especially when they have taken away almost all bins (I’m surprised they haven’t used see-through bins yet). I hate to think where all of this trash is going – London already has enough space problems, I wonder which poor English town has it in for the rubbish…
Hmmm… maybe they burn it, like they do in Florida? I know what you mean about the cigarette butts Bender. People in New York just throw them where they stand, even if they’re a few metres away from a bin – it’s disgusting. They should fine people for it, $100 on the spot – that’d change their attitude pretty quickly.
I’m assuming you mean “safety-conscious” ?
Perhaps a little too much Caribbean mist young Kua ?
Passive only of course…
Oops. I did mean that of course 😉
Come on Kua – where’s the next post !!!