By Latrishka Thomas
After enduring two years without the Caribbean’s greatest summer festival, locals had a serious case of Carnival tabanca — the Caribbean expression for heartbreak, longing, missing something beyond words.
So, when they received the news that the festival was going to be held this year, they were elated despite hearing that it would be scaled down.
However, the week of Carnival came and, just like that, it was all over.
Observer asked several persons who participated in the activities how they would rate the festival on a scale of one to 10, and the average score was 7.
One man said that he was glad to “finally be back on the road.”
“Even if it was one day, I would be glad because it’s better than nothing. I missed carnival no joke,” he stated.
One young woman who said that she tried to attend as many events as possible said: “It needs some work but I understand they had to make changes because of the short time they had to plan and because they had to pack a lot into one week. Hopefully next year is better.”
“I enjoyed the pre-carnival fetes more than actual carnival. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t horrible but it wasn’t like former years either,” she added after giving her rating.
An older woman stated that she could not give this year’s carnival a full score because, “there was too much dancehall in carnival. I don’t know how we became like that. But I still made the best of it and I had fun especially at T-shirt mas’.”
“I give it a 5 because I expected more. Even Party Monarch was dead compared to 2019 and so. I can’t really blame the government alone though,” one reveller shared.
A young man added his two-cents, saying: “Something was missing. I can’t put my hand on it but it wasn’t the same. I’m glad we got a taste of it though, but it was bittersweet … sweet because of the music and vibes people brought, but bitter because I wanted more.”
Meanwhile, a few people expressed disappointment with the Party Monarch results.
“Menace gave us winning performances in both segments. I don’t know what the judges had in but they could not have been sober,” a Party Monarch attendee shared.
“For me, Claudette did great and deserves it but what did Lyrics Man do to win? Even some of the new people did better than him,” another added.
“Something fishy there,” one man commented.
The 2022 Carnival celebrations came to close at midnight yesterday after the parade of troupes and groups and Last Lap street jam.