Carnaval!

On a rainy Sunday night Chris, Mara, Rodrigo, Brandon and myself took a taxi to the Sambodrome in Centro in Rio. The Sambodrome is a big outdoor row of bleachers built specifically for the samba schools to parade through at Carnaval. Each school is a group of 5,000 people who spend the year building floats and costumes, working on a theme, and practicing dances and songs. They get exactly one hour and twenty minutes to parade the quarter mile through the Sambodrome, if they go over or under on time, they have points deducted. The groups are judged on how well they sing and dance, their creativity, their timing, and ther floats. Each group us allowed to have eight floats. Regular people can pay money to dance in the parades with costumes and famous people get to ride on the floats. It's amazing how much time and effort goes into each school.

The whole thing starts around 11pm and goes until after 5 in the morning. It's a two night deal with about 6 or 7 schools competing each night. On Wednesday they will announce the seven finalists and then next Saturday they will all do it again.

Walking into the Sambodrome, was crazy. Mara and Rodrigo kept us gringos hidden and got tickets from the scalpers. We paid 40 reas each (about $25) and our seats were far up, but you could see everything. Going into the Sambodrome was packed, wet, dirty, people with bits and pieces of their costumes all over the place, floats being taken down, stray dogs running around, kids selling beer, and a general happiness. Everyone dances around and cheers for their favorite school. I highly recommend this experience... Chris thought it may be better than the Indy 500, although he'll probably deny that now.

I've posted the pics here and tried to explain the certain themes and floats. Unfortinatly, we were far away so you can't see all the detail, but it was still great.

Chris is sick today with a flu or cold or something so he's laying low. It's still cloudy but I think I'll go to the beach at Ipanema.