Travel Thursday on Empty Streets: Masskara Festival 2009

Masskara is a cool celebration of smiles that is celebrated in Bacolod during the month of October. It starts out here in Makati and it is every year that I get to see cool costumes and masks that reminds me of the Masquerade parties in South America.
This year though is quite special as this is going to be the Festival's 30th anniversary and according to the news they are getting ready for something different and special this ey
To get the Complete Schedule List simply click on this link: Masskara Festival Schedule

*** Update ****
My Bad, I almost forgot to talk about the origin of this festival but thankfully a cool blogger gave me a heads up and made me realize what was missing :)

This is for you Bad Gals Sound Off :)
History

The festival first began in 1980 during a period of crisis. The province relied on sugar cane as its primary agricultural crop, and the price of sugar was at an all-time low due to the introduction of sugar substitutes like high fructose corn syrup in the United States.[1] It was also a time of tragedy; on April 22 of that year, the inter-island vessel Don Juan carrying many Negrenses, including those belonging to prominent families in Bacolod City, collided with the tanker Tacloban City and sank. An estimated 700 lives were lost in the tragedy.

In the midst of these tragic events, the city's artists, local government and civic groups decided to hold a festival of smiles, because the city at that time was also known as the City of Smiles. They reasoned that a festival was also a good opportunity to pull the residents out of the pervasive gloomy atmosphere. The initial festival was therefore, a declaration by the people of the city that no matter how tough and bad the times were, Bacolod City is going to pull through, survive, and in the end, triumph.

The word "MassKara" is a portmanteau, coined by the late artist Ely Santiago from the word "mass" meaning "many or a multitude of the people", and the Spanish word cara meaning "face". A prominent feature of the festival is the mask worn by participants; these are always adorned with smiling faces. MassKara thus means a multitude of smiling faces.

Here is a video from last year's Masskara Festival:






--I owe a public apology for the way this article was originally written prior to today as I just got not that there were parts of the post that was copied by my sister to write this article and for that am a bit ashamed of that. It is of no excuse that something like that has happened as I normally ensure that quality of the posts. I have also asked my sister to be careful next time as she is the one who covers for some of the articles whenever my schedule gets a lot more hectic than usual. So for that I truly owe a bit apology to Eric of Byahilo.com whose article on the Masskara festival can be found here: Byahilo Masskara Festival. Once again my apologies to Mr Eric Dee.