Winners parade

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The Carnaval in Rio is a competition between 14 samba schools from all over Brazil, 10 of which are from Rio.
It is much more commercialized than the carnaval in Salvador, but still amazing in many ways.
The Carnaval takes place in the Sumbodromo, which is a huge stadium that was built especially for the Carnavals.
Each school has something like 2,000 - 3,000 dancers.
A school starts the preparation for the carnaval a year in advance: first it chooses a theme, than draws a competition to compose a song for it,
and at last invents different customs and samba dances for the song.

This competition is a very serious business in Brazil.
When the winning schools where announced on the TV, the streets were empty and quiet, like during the final 4 in Israel.
This was the most important peace of news the next day, and I think there was not even one Carioca (citizen of Rio) that hasn't known the results.

In the winners parade, which I intended, the winning 6 schools parade the Sumbodromo, and show the audience why they´ve deserved to win.
Each school presented hundreds of different customs, but the dance was usually pretty simple, except some professionals which were in the main roles.
What was annoying a bit, is the fact that each schools' song had been played repeatedly during its entire parade, which took something like an hour and a half per school.
The customs were so varied and amazing, and got more and more crazy with each school, that I even won´t try to describe them by words, and let the photos tell the story.
Let me just say, that we stayed there from 7 pm until 5 am, and danced even with the last school.

Unfortunately what I hadn't known was that the order of the winners was in reverse - from the 6th place to the 1st place, so I ran out of memory & battery on the 3rd school, and don´t have pictures of the better schools which had the most beautiful customs.

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Photos

The crowd
And it´s just one tribune out of dozens.

Sumbodromo
It´s end, to be more preciese

Fireworks
They fired fireworks as each school started its parade

Minor dancers
The dancers between the stands

I´m considering to join a Samba school
Our places were towards the end of the stadium and the parade, so the dancers didn´t mind to throw us their customs, if we asked them nice enough.