The big day(s)

Finally it started. Carnaval!!!!
On Friday we decided do join a bloco that was nice but only lasted a few hours. It was cool, some Samba music, some caipirinha´s, dancing a lot etc. Saturday there was a bigger bloco in Ipanama where we went to, it´s a very famous one in Rio called Banda de Ipanema, known for the many drag queens going in it. Now is where the crazyness really started. Packed crowds on the wide Ipanema lanes. Live percussion band and music and lots of sweating bodies jumping up and down and doing samba steps.

Then, Sunday was the big day as we were going to parade in the Sambadromo, the biggest parade in the world. We got there way too early in our costumes, sweating like hell because it was still more than 30 degrees and these costumes were quite big. After walking around for a long time we finally found our Ala, the part in the samba school where we had to be in. After waiting around for even longer it finally all started to come together and was starting to get some shape. Every school has about 8 big floats with in between the people in costumes, dancers, the percussion band, baianas, porta-bandeira and mestre sala, etc, etc. One Samba school parades with about 3000 to 4000 people, yes, thousand!!! We were behind the 5th float. Our Samba school, Rohinha, was the second school of seven to parade on Sunday and by the time that we started it was already one hour behind schedule.

Things ended up not going as planned.
1. It started to rain
2. The float in front of us had some problems to get under a bridge and turn onto the sambadromo so we were waiting for a long time.
3. All of a sudden they told us that we had to pass the truck and run into the sambadromo because we were by now 6 minutes behind the previous group of people and a parade has to be really tight. So, we had to run the first 1/3 of the sambadromo, WITH hats that didn´t stay on and pants that were hard not to trip over. It must have been a very funny sight, us running in there, totally out of control and uncoordinated.

By the time we reached the rest of the parade, as I said, things were very uncoordinated. We just danced a bit through and did our own thing. Danced samba, waved at the people in the crowd and tried our best at the samba song of this school. It all went very fast. While running th erain had stopped for a bit but now as we were walking it strated to poor!!! Really hard! Still it was very much fun and a great experience. We were feeling very sorry for our samba schho because they didn´t have all the luck they deserve.

Rocinha is a samba school that just came from second devision and is trying to stay in 1st division . On wednesday we´ll know the results of the jury and know if Rocinha will stay in 1st. By the way, Rocinha is the biggest favele, slump, in latin america.

After parading we were initially planning to try to get a place in the sambadromo but we were actually too tired, wet, and sick of our costumes that we decided to go home.

So, yesterday we went back, in comfortable cloathes. We maneged quite well to find tickets on the black market for decent seats and for only 100 Euro which is extremely cheap since most of the decent spots in the sambadromo cost more than 200 Euro.

The parade started around 9pm and it took the 7 schools till just before 8am to parade through, just to give you an idea about the immens size of these parades!!! We danced samba all night and very much enjoyed the parade. When I´m back home, just come by to watch some pictures, listen to samba tunes and watch video´s of this parade. It´s amazing!

We were in bed by 9 this morning, slept for a few hours and now we are going to get ready for another party. Last night of the carnaval. Tomorrow night we´ll head to Bahia.

I wanted to post some pictures but it didn´t work. Friggin´PC´s again. There´s an apple place around the corner. I´ll try to post some pics later today or tomorrow.