Carnaval!!!!!!

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The first Samba School

The best Samba school

Its Carnival time!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (or Carnaval as they say here) And here I am in Rio de Janeiro. You have never experienced a party until you have experienced this I am telling you.

Samabdrome

I honestly don't think words can describe this event. This was the night I had most been looking forward to and it did not disappoint. Unfortunatly it rained half the night and I felt a bit ill but it was still fantastic. We were sat in stand 13 which was on the left hand side right at the finishing line and we had a great view. Its hard to choose where the best stand is. Of course from our stand you got the full scale of it which you could not get up close but then you miss some of the detail. The sambadrome is huge and the samba schools are just as big! A school would start its parade down the straight and it would be 40 minutes until we would get to see the first person. The strip was packed at all times and each school went on for about 1hr 30mins so you can imagine how large they really are. And the floats are just out of this world ranging from trampolining pirate ships to actually moving ski slopes!

Each school has a theme and the whole hour and a half has to stick to that theme. The themes we saw included the Portugese Rule, Emotions, Japanese theme etc. But the best one by far was the global warming theme. It started off with water and ice and everything was blue and white. It then went on to the earth and had lots of flowers etc. And finally it moved onto the animal kingdom (and these floats were fantastic!) This was by far the best school that we got to see during our night at the Sambadrome.You can see the videos of these at the bottom of this blog.

Street Parties and Bloca's

Carnival can be really expensive but there is so much to do here for free. The other day I was sitting in this very internet cafe and a samba band, followed by a huge crowd of people just went dancing past. There are parties everywhere and beacuse I am staying in Lapa, I am in the very centre of it!

The very first night we headed into Lapa to experience this street party, but we didn't leave the hotel till about midnight because nothing much starts before that! About 10 minutes out the front door and the heavens open. Within a couple of minutes we were soaked through to our underwear. However we decide as we were already wet we would carry on, so there we were dancing in the rain with all these Cariocas looking at us as if we were insane! The rain soon stopped and we danced around a bit before have a long (and complicated) conversation with three Cariocas with only one speaking English. We did not have a late one though beacuse many people had spent the whole day travelling so we were back by about 2ish.

A few days later, we decided to go down to Copacobana to sample the parties and bloca's down there. It took us a while to get there however due to a bloca blocking the roads of all the buses trying to get out of Lapa! We eventually go there however and found a great little street party and after watching a few dancing competitions (I've never seen people move the way they do here, it's as if they have extra muscle in their bodies) we all started dancing around. We met some really hilarious people. One guy called Anderson was so sweet and we met a bunch of guys from Chile as well. Everyone is so unbelievably friendly here!


So I have throughly enjoyed my carnival experience and know that one day I will come back to andl ive it all again! And I very much recommend that you experience it to! Ciao

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Photos

Hats
An example of the array of hats and headresses that were available!

Elephant!
An example of one of the floats.

Comments

[dad]

still a junior tharg!...but improving

[Mum]

Great blog
but you need to move more slowly when videoing Soph as it was too fast to see what was what!!

[LegallyBlonde]

Mum I would but it takes up half my memory card just to do that so it was just supposed to be a overview!