Brett and Emily in South America: A more detailed explanation of Carnaval

All of our (and our friend Eitan's) Carnaval Pics click here...http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2861229&id=13900087&l=c1dde39e28 (you shouldn't need a facebook acount to check them out)

Brett didn't give you too much detail about our carnaval experience, so I will try to explain it a bit more. For starters we went to a huge street party (they seem to be all over the place). Everyone was dressed up in crazy costumes like it was Halloween, with the most popular costume being men dressed as women. There was lots of music and dancing, my favorite being when people started dancing and singing along to the song "Its raining men", even though they dont know english, so they had no idea what it meant and all of the men there were dressed as women. Ironic.

Guys Dressed as Women

After that we went to the big parade which was at a huge permanent stadium, called a Sambadrome, that was built special for Carnaval parades. Instead of a having big field in the middle, it was like a normal 2-3 lane city street with bleachers and VIP boxes on either side lining the street. It was also pretty long and had a building and parking lots at the end for set up area. The parade didn't start until 9:30 or 10PM. At about 1:30AM we realized that we had only seen two fifths of the parade, since each samba school puts on its own parade that lasts about an hour or more with about a half hour intermission between parades and we had only seen 2 out of the 5 schools by then. This turned out to be a very long night. It didn't end until after 6am and by the time we got back to the hostel it was nearly 8am and time for breakfast before going to sleep for most of the day.

Parade Arena, called a Sambadrome, from the Outside

The parades themselves were increadable. Before each one there were fireworks, which were pretty cool. Each Samba school had approximately 3-5 huge floats and probably a thousand dancers total throughout each parade broken up into different groups. The parades all seemed to have a theme or tell a story as they went with one concept flowing into the next. The floats were enormous works of art with lights, moving parts, smoke machines, glitter flying, water cannons, etc. They shook under the dancers that were all over them wearing elaborate costumes and dancing samba like crazy. The dancers wore costumes including huge head-dresses and 'wings' made from all kinds of glitteryness, feathers, etc. with the women wearing enormous high heals as well. Between the floats there were various groups of about 100 dancers (actually many of them seemed like regular people that just liked grooving along with the parade). The groups wore matching costumes that were very beautiful and eccentric (more glitter and feathers) and the costumes represented different aspects of the theme of the parade. There were also professional samba dancers performing in the parade (again, amaizing costumes) which were really impressive to watch. Each parade also had a band of percussionists and singers who were mic'ed into the stadium speakers and and sang for the whole parade. Everyone was dancing and singing and putting on quite a show. And samba is tough - although I am proud to say that I picked up a few moves, but am not quite up to parade standards.