CariWest 2023

After a few lockdown-closed years, the Edmonton Caribbean^† Festival is back this year with a vengeance. Even the annual parade is back (unlike for Klondike Days) and while its length and spectacle are lower than previous years, the main event at Churchill Square (see image at the top) is back in action.

^† I believe somewhere buried in the official name it's called the Afro-Caribbean festival, since there was a huge representation from Trinidad, St. Lucia, Barbados, Haiti, and Jamaica...and basically zero representation from Mexico, Venezuela, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Columbia, or Nicaragua. Indeed even within the countries, blacks aren't even the ethnic majority in Trinidad and Suriname (those would be Indians as in East Indians) yet they comprise the entire (apparent) cultural and demographic breadth of the region.

And as is typical for the Caribbean Festival, if you think racial stereotypes are wrong and misguided your worldview gets absolutely destroyed, because every negative thing about niggers you ever thought (minus one glaring example) comes true.

Let's start with the parade. Or rather, let's start with the parade despite the parade not starting. It's been over a decade that I've been pointing out that the race notorious for always being late for work (and/or slow drivers) also can't start a parade within half an hour of the widely agreed and published start time. It was almost 1pm this year before the parade finally made its way onto Jasper Avenue, leaving thousands of people unproductively sitting around when they could have taken extra time to make a better breakfast or mow that one annoyingly small piece of lawn that keeps getting put off.

Waiting on the Robert E. Lee lazy blacks to get their act together

On top of that, both at the grounds and annoyingly on the parade path itself were numerous examples of the "Blacks and the Domination of Social Space" effect I recently reposted after the original source was scrubbed from the internet. You couldn't stand a foot onto the street without some uppity nigger apparently cursed with poor eyesight and unable to watch the parade from the relatively empty sidewalks ten feet from you in either direction standing directly in front of you for a minute, watching his friends who he all knows marching by, only to run further down and repeat the process to some other unwitting victim.

Speaking of which, I posted way back in 2006 how it was creepy on transit when you realize every nigger in Edmonton knows each other. And yep, you saw a ton of that both at CariWest and on the parade route. Which I suppose may tie into the one thing that was conspicuously absent from this and most CariWest festivals: why is it when the second-most violent of all races stops being violent when you throw all of them together in a giant pile? I honestly don't (yet) have a strong answer to this, but the theory that you know that if another nigger wants to kill you, you stay away from the festival its 99.999% likely he will attend, in such a way that you may roll the dice on random bars. It could also be that the African community acts much differently than the Afro-Caribbean community, but those of you Third Edge of the Sword blog historians know that doesn't match with the known facts either.

So since we just covered the one stereotype that got skipped, let's switch to the next one that didn't: blacks have incredibly poor governance and organizational skills, possibly related to them being literally retarded. The systems and the implementation of systems at Churchill Square were ridiculous.

1. You had to buy drink tickets in order to get (alcoholic) drinks. Of the central tents, one of them had a helpful sign on the desk (immediately covered up by the throngs of people) labelled "cash or card". There was literally no other signage. How much were tickets? Was it the same tickets for beer or hard alcohol or wine? How many tickets do the drinks cost? None of that information was available, which meant that as more and more people began lining up for drinks around 2pm every single person who went up to the front had to waste time asking those exact questions. There was a hilariously annoying period in which nobody was lined up for drinks because no less than 8 people were there to serve you beverages while only 2 people were selling you the tickets, a process which was taking far longer (due to the signage).
2. Related to (1) is that there was no overhead "drink ticket line" sign that people could read after more than 3 people got into the line, leaving no shortage of people confused by what was going on. The white people in attendance seemed to give off a "you either work here or you can figure out what's going on and explain it to me" vibe as we were consistently approached to explain what we were doing in line and what everything meant. Much like the earlier entries, I guess I can't complain when the stereotype ("whites are the solution to my problem") turns out to be accurate.
   
3. You had to buy food tickets in order to get food and nonalcoholic drinks. Here at least there were two tents on opposite corners of the square which could serve you, a big sign calling them food tickets, and even had signs telling you how much tickets cost! This was a win, so you might wonder why its here: the answer is that the food tickets weren't also the drink tickets, which caused endless consternation to single people who couldn't do the "you buy our food tickets, you buy our drink tickets" trick. It would have also been nice to know that 4-8 food tickets were required for most items, but I feel like I'm quibbling.
4. What I'm certainly not quibbling about were the design of the lineups. The main drink lines in particular had three (3) velvet plastic ropes separating the patrons into four (4) lines, but when you got to the front there were five (5) people taking your drink order, so in general the left line moved far faster than any other. On the north side of the tent, two (2) ropes separated you into three (3) lines, and at the front were only two (2) people taking your order, causing endless debates regarding who was next in line as two lines suddenly found themselves both feeling entitled to the same guy. Eventually they did move the ropes to close off the middle aisle and the line/bartender ratio was normalized...until about 4pm suddenly they put a third staff member there and again you had two (2) lines and three (3) bartenders.
   
5. Much like Taste of Edmonton, there were food vendors both along 99th Street/Rue Hull East of Churchill Square and also 100th Street West of Churchill Square. Yet inexplicably you couldn't take alcohol past the Eastern boundary of 100th Street, leaving half the food vendors unable to offer their services to patrons wandering around with their drinks.
6. This may not strictly be an organization thing, but why don't they have performers who know that when the speakers aren't loud enough for you, the solution is to ask the sound guy to increase the volume and not scream louder and louder until your already-questionable Caribbean babble becomes completely unintelligible? Literally one guy all afternoon/evening asked the sound guy to change his volume.
   

For all the issues though, it's good to see another of Edmonton's festivals come back to normal -- the parade wasn't as big as previous years, as I noted above, but the rest of the experience was pretty much back to 2017 levels. And while it will never be normal to me that a Caribbean Festival includes tons of tributes to Zimbabwe and none to Honduras, a good time seems to have been had by all. Plus, for added bonus, the drink tent gave you a plastic straw!

See you next year...at 12:40 at the earliest.