5th day 1/1/17

Today we were up at midnight, since it was New Year's Eve.  We finally heard the words 3, 2, 1 HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! It is finally 2017 and New Year's Day. It was not long before we realized that this was our very first New Year’s not being with our families and being out of the country.  We knew we had to make it just as fun as if we were home with our families.

We decided to share our New Year’s resolutions with each other to try and have some fun and celebrate the New Year.  Kailynn wanted her new year's resolution to be to meet more new people.  Meanwhile, Alyssa wanted to go to more countries and travel around the world.  We tried to ask Avni what her resolution was, but when we turned the corner she was dead asleep!  We thought that it might be a good time to take a small, quick nap and get ready for the early hours of the next holiday, Junkanoo, which is a street parade with music, dance, and costumes of Ibo origin.  Once it was around 1:45am, we all woke up to go to downtown Nassau to celebrate this holiday.

This holiday is all about how Junkanoo (Holiday) was the strongest tribe in the Bahamas at the time.  They were slaves who worked about all year long except Christmas.  This time was used for celebration and this is how Junkanoo was born. Junkanoo is a holiday that celebrates Bahamas' culture through colorful clothes and parades.  These costumes were made out of the materials they could find like leaves and feathers.  Today the costumes are normally made of cardboard, crepe paper, aluminum rods, tie wire, and contact cement.  These costumes were made to celebrate the gods Neptune and Amphitrite and also John Canoe which the holiday is named after.

It was an absolute great parade and we could really feel the culture of the Bahamas while watching it.  It was a great opportunity for us to participate in the Bahamian tradition.  The parade was full of music, dance and costumes.  The most interesting part was seeing all of the colorful costumes that people were wearing and how energetic the whole feel of the parade was.  The parade was said to go from 2AM to 10AM from some of the locals, but we all could not take it for that long and headed back to our hotel around 6 AM.  We slept until almost 4 PM!  It was a needed nap from the long day we had.

When we woke up, we were all starving, so we decided to go to Arawak Cay and find a restaurant to eat at for the night. We ate the famous fish fry from some of the vendors in Arawak Cay. We have no complaints about this food, and it was really neat to eat Bahamian street food for the first time!