I am sitting in an apartment in Florianopolis watching the second night of the Samba school parades on television. Last night I was there. I didn't get to watch the spectacle from the bleachers, but I was there. The parade works as follows, the samba schools are like professional sport clubs. The different schools work all year to make their costumes, their floats, their choreography and their music better than the rest. Then then have one time to parade in front of judges at carnaval. The parades happen typically from 10pm to 5 am though this year they started earlier because last year there was a devastating fire that took out three of the schools costumes and floats weeks before they were to parade. The purpose of parading is to determine who is the best and who is at the bottom. The bottom two schools go down to a lesser level and the top two schools from the lower level get to rise to the televised level. Last year because of the fire no schools went down but two still went up.
The samba parade is what I have always assoicated with carnaval, but there is so much more going on in the streets! Carnaval is basically a huge street party where everyone sings, chants, dances, wears costumes and generallly celebrates. There are street parades as well as parties called blocos, like block parties. There are about 200 official blocos in the streets over the holiday days, and some of the blocos are very famous too. They have very peculiar and specific names, for example the translation of the one we went to in Ipanema is 'Infatuation is almost love so kiss me'.
As many of you know I love getting dressed up in costume for whatever reason. Though I wasn't able to pull out a full outfit for the street parties like I usually do for Halloween, I still had a blast enjoying other peoples costumes. Plus I don't think I was adequately prepared for how hot and humid Rio de Janeiro is in February which really limits a lot of the costume options for fear of overheating.
It is hard to describe how many people are in the streets, because we don't have this many people in Canadian cities, but I will try. Imagine the way Robson Street was during the Olympics after the Gold Medal Hockey Game, and now spread that throughout an entire city, and you will get the idea. Patience and luck were definitely essentialy for getting around if you wanted to participate in the blocos. The subway was a mob and taxis seemingly always full. You had to wait for hours for both, if you spoke Portuguese. If you are an English speaking tourist such as myself I would say let everyone else go home first and then try and get home because there is not way you will be able to out-run, out-heckle or out-scheme a determined Brazilian from taking the cab you had your eye on. At least that is my experience.
I luckily had some very good support from my Brasilia-city friends, Cammilla and Bruno, who had come to Rio to celebrate, like 1 million other tourists from Brazil and abroad.
One of the highlights of my carnaval experience were some of the random interactions. For example, I was walking in Ipanema and Leblon Saturday afternoon enjoying the beach, the sun and the crowds before meeting up with my friends, when I decided to sit on the walkway at the edge of the beach and enjoy the view. Shortly thereafter a woman who was talking loudly (in Portuguese) on her phone hung up and came right to me and sat next to me to talk. I said I didn't understan (in Portuguese) and she replied that I shouldn't tell her I don't understand and continued on venting her woes to me. Apparently she was having man troubles and needed an ear to listen to her. I did my best to follow her story with ample 'No he did that!' 'Oh that's not good' and 'I understand' so that I was able to provide some relief. She then offered me a cigarette and gave me some advice about marriage before I continued on my way.
Next I was drawn to some awesome tunes coming from the open air lounge overlooking one of the side streets. The DJ was awesome and he was accompanied by a sax player (who apparently was playing the flute previously) and then later another instrumentalist playing the trumpet. It was sick!!!!! People couldn't help but move to the beat and I was captivated. Well in the crowd I met two cousins who are from Toronto orginally and one of them will be moving back to Barcelona from Sao Paulo later this year right around the time I plan on visiting. So she gave me her information and encouraged me to look her up when I am around. Sometimes I am amazed at how generous people are to complete strangers.
One last story is about robbery. One of my goals in Brazil, but particularly Rio, was not to get into a dangerous situation and not to get robbed. I have succeeded so far, but in the crowds yesterday, Bruno got pit-pocketed. It was not a pleasant realization, though all Bruno was carrying in his wallet was R$30 and a few identity cards. He didn't care about the money, but the identity cards were necessary to take his flight home on Tuesday and he would have to cancel his bank and credit card. We tried to get to a police station to report the robbery so that Bruno could get a document saying he had been robbed which would be his identity card for the plane and driving until he was able to replace these cards, but we kept getting stuck in the bloco parade! So we decided to go home and to deal with it later in the day. Honestly, right after lunch the phone rang at the apartment, and someone has found his wallet and they lived only two kilometers from where we were staying! What luck. The money was gone, but the cards still there. Apparently this is not extremely uncommon because the robbers only want the cash, but to have the wallet to be recovered so quickly and to have it picked up by someone so close to us was impressive in my opinion.
I was dissapointed that there weren't more samba outfits in the streets, but apparently the costumes cost hundreds or thousands of dollars and weight many many kilos. Too bad. But that does bring me back to seeing the Sambodromo. At the end of our night on Sunday, our cab driver took a detour so that we got to drive by the Sambodromo in full action, lighting up the night sky with its lights, and then we drove along the avenue where all the samba schools line up and prep their parade so that I could see all the floats up close. They are so big and beautiful!!! I feel so lucky to have seen them in real life before going home to watch the big constructions we had just seen parade on TV to be judged.
All in all, I feel like I have experienced and accomplished what I set out to at carnaval 2012. Now the adventures can continue.
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