10-10, 30th July 2011

10-10, 30th July 2011, a set on Flickr.

After the exhausting activities of J’ouvert, I somehow only managed to sleep for about 3hrs before I woke up on Saturday morning. I still didn’t have my luggage and my call to the airline that morning did not yield any results. As in they hadn’t even located my bag. I was getting highly irritated as I had no change of clothes or underwear so I went SHOPPING. (Of course any excuse to go shopping)
I spent most of the day walking through Bridgetown, entering almost every shop along the way, doing more window shopping that actual shopping. Later that evening the airline delivered my luggage so I was relieved and ready to jollificate proproly. The agenda for that night was a concert/show tagged 10-10
10-10 means 10PM – 10AM. 12 hours, 20 soca artistes, 4 bands and 10 soca Djs.
Now I wasn’t sure if they were serious about having a concert for 12hours because I wasn’t sure how possible it is, but I was grossly underestimating the bajan people. My friends and I arrived at the venue by 2:30AM, we hadn’t missed too much because as with every concert the smaller, less entertaining artistes usually start first. It was a great upbeat crowd out there. Just as it should be because if you’re not the upbeat, ready-for-anything type, you really do not have any business showing up at a soca concert. Soca artistes and Djs are crazy people, so it is considered perfectly normal for the artiste to just start shouting “WATER, WATER, WATER” and somebody would show up with a hose and start spraying water into the crowd. And they love crowd participation, so if they’re not asking you to wave your flag,, they’re asking the crowd to move to the left or right. Or randomly picking people to get on stage and dance. Oh and can I just say how it’s always the big (fat) girls that are first to rush on stage here? There was this big girl that did a split even I can not attempt. Good stuff.
And the crowd around me was just crazy. I mean when the crowd is more entertaining or just as entertaining as the stage, you know you’re at a great concert. Again there aren’t enough words to describe the madness, but I had my camera at the ready and I risked my life and health to take some pictures to share. I mean y’all owe me because I had to perfect the art of taking a picture while looking in a different direction. It was already dawn so I was able to turn off my flash but my camera battery died so I couldn’t take as many pictures as I’d wanted to.
Bajan girls are very wild and crazy with their dressing, like it’s all about pum-pum shorts or leggings. Regardless of size. I saw girls wearing shorts that I wouldn’t even wear as underwear. I saw all shapes and sizes of females in leggings, and crop tops. There were several crimes of visible panty lines, then there were just plain visible panties or straight up commando. Lots of hoodrat things going on, infact the Wwest Indies is the cradle of hoodray shenanigans. Gold capped teeth, random leg/calf tattoos, multicolored weaves,, name it i saw it that day. Women dancing crazy, crazy performances on stage, an all round crazy, fun time.
By the time 6AM rolled around people were still grooving, they just put their sunglasses on and the party continued. At some point it began to rain but the performances on stage did not stop and so the party did not stop. I promise you there is no party like a west Indian party. These people will party no matter the weather, no matter the economic climate, nothing, NOTHING stops the show. I had to buy myself a redbull to remain awake. We were at the venue till 9AM and let me just tell you we were not the last people to leave the venue.
A fun time was had by all and I returned to my room by 10:00AM not feeling sleepy because the effects of the red bull hadn’t worn off.
I’ll include the link to my flickr account where I uploaded the pictures. Flickr is turning out to be a very long tin. First it takes forever to upload the pictures and then there’s a picture limit. So if anyone can suggest a better way to share pictures it will be appreciated. I’m really not about to upload pictures to this here blog one by one.