Carnaval

Since quite a few people have been asking me about my Carnaval experience, I thought I'd write a quick update.

Like I said last time, we go to blocos (or block parties) to celebrate Carnaval.  I heard somewhere that there are about 400 all over the city of Rio, which I can believe.  Some of them stay in place but some of them move around like a parade.  The ones that we have been to have been super crowded.  A friend here said that there are smaller ones around the city, but I think Fabiano likes to go to the big ones so that's what we have hit up thus far.

This is just the entrance to one bloco!

Each bloco has a specific start and end time.  Some of them start as early as 9 AM and as late as 10 PM but really it goes 24 hours.  People will dress up for them.  There have been lots of guys in drag, which are hilarious, but I've seen other costumes as well.  And it's not just adults that join in on the fun.  I've seen very small babies with their parents dancing around to the music.  Anyway, the fun thing about the blocos is once one ends, you wander until you find another.  You usually don't end up walking more than 10 minutes before you find the next party.  And since there are no open container laws in this country (!!!), you can roam around with a beer in hand.  

The itty, bitty baby was dressed up as Snow White.

Some of the blocos are sponsored by a beer called Antartica, so there are offical vendors selling them for cheap.  You find other types of vendors selling food or my new personal favorite, alcoholic push pops.  I'm pretty sure that at the ones that aren't sponsored there are just random vendors walking around.

The bloco in front of where we are staying.
This wasn't as big as some of them that we've been to.

The blocos also have bands playing at them.  But it isn't just random music.  There are Carnaval songs that the play.  Everyone knows all the words and starts jumping up and down and dancing to them.  The songs can date back as far as the 1920s.  I've started to pick up on some of the words because Fabiano has been playing them on repeat pretty much since we got here.

Some of the floats we saw on the way home.

At night is when the samba parade starts.  We're not going to that because the tickets are ungodly expensive, but you can get a little taste of what it's like here.  They go all night.  You have 90 minutes to get from one end of the sambadrom to the other with making as few mistakes as possible.  We watch some of it on TV when we get home.  When Mike and I were making our way home from one of the blocos, we saw some of the floats on the side of the road.  They were pretty impressive.

Well, that's about all I've got for now.  I'll keep the pictures coming, I promise.  Mike has taken over 700 pictures (wow!) which I promise to share with everyone when we get back.