Advertisement
Published: February 22nd 2007
Hello everyone,
Brazil! What a great place. Carnival has been bonkers; C arrived on Carnival weekend and met up with Mr S. It has been a crazy few days, mostly involving samba and lots of caipirinha. The street parties and beach parties have been great but the culmination was the enormous party at the purpose built sambadromo (see photos).
Before a crowd of around 30,000 people each of 14 samba schools has its chance to strut their stuff (split over two days). The drummers that hammer out the beat for each school are 400 strong and each takes an hour and twenty minutes to parade along the strip. We were sat opposite the judges which was great as it meant all the schools really went for it right were we stood. It is quite a marathon as its start at 8pm and runs until 7am!
C visited the Maracanã stadium (along with 40,000 other people!) to see Rio´s popular team, Flamengo play Maracaibo. It was bonkers. The ticket office tried to sell us some tourist seats which I think are generally safer but also a bit lame, instead we pushed for some seats with the hardcore fans
and we got what we asked for: fireworks, lots of flags, singing, jumping, bouncing and throwing (anything available). See the
match photo The weather is amazingly hot but there are plenty of beaches nearby (see photo). Robert would love it here. There are some suspicions that he may well be at large in the amazon rainforest; his cousin´s came to the match and told me this (see photo).
C is soon off to Florianopolis in the south, this will probably involve a 18 hour bus journey so journey sweets are on the shopping list.
Hope all are well.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.158s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 7; qc: 52; dbt: 0.1137s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
M
non-member comment
Rio
Have a great time. It looks fantastic. I should watch Robert!