Dancing horses and Who spiked my drink!

It's a parade, yay!

Have you ever seen a horse dancing?
How many horses have you seen at one time?
I shouldn't have accepted that free drink at the festival, it was spiked!

Here is one of my favorite sayings "A mind stretched by new experiences can never go back to the same shape" and how cool was it that it happened today. I will never ever look at a horse the same way.

Well this is what I saw: DANCING HORSES!

How is it possible that in my 55 years I never knew that horses could dance (and better than me, but that's not hard at all!).

I'll have a video at the end to show you.

The parade: "La Cabalgata de Villa de Álvarez" has been held for 166 years. The festival will go from Feb 10-27 this year. I guess it's a big deal. I don't know how many horses and riders there were, but I'd lay money on more than 3,000! I've never seen so many horses in one place! (Yep, there was a lot of poo too!). There would be a large truck (even semi trucks) that would have a band on them (think lots of brass instruments), then there would be dozens of horses with riders. Then another truck with another band, then dozens more horses with riders. It was incredible.

As you can imagine, when there's a band that is 20 feet from you, you can feel every note of every song. Well, guess what? Apparently the horses can too! Several of the horses were dancing with the music! I don't know how that works, but it didn't appear that the cowboy was doing anything special to make the horse move with the beat.

This went on and on and on for miles and miles and miles. It was a big deal and spirits were high as they passed each of the parade watchers. I was absolutely amazed!

There was even a horse with speakers attached to it

Shortly after I had mentioned that this parade wasn't throwing candy as in the United States, we passed through the middle of the parade and behind one of the parade trucks. This truck signage said something like "conserve the town" and had pictures of cleaning the city. It was sponsored by a car wash based on the other sign on the side. The nice gentleman in the back handed each of us a drink. It was the funniest tasting Jamaica drink with nuts in it that I had ever had. I really, really like to do local activities when I'm out of town, so I kept drinking it. My friends didn't drink theirs and one of them said "it has alcohol in it". I thought, no.... who would give out free booze? Well it took half the bottle, but sure enough, I was then convinced it was spiked! So it got dumped out (after a few more drinks to make absolutely sure). There wan't anything devious about them spiking the drink, it was just a party atmosphere.

This picture is as blurry as I was

Of course while we were at the festival, we had to buy "elote" (corn) in a cup, cause I love corn.

I hope you enjoy watching the horses dance. I'm not sure that you can see it on the video, but there were several horses that had their manes brushed and washed and even braided. They spent a ton of time preparing their horses for this.

Enjoy the show: