This year we were incredibly fortunate to visit Rio during Carnaval. We went to the main attraction at the Sambadrome to see the parade. I'm going to try and explain what it was like, but I assure you that any glimmer that you gain is just a pale shadow of what it was actually like.
It starts are 9 pm and goes to about 6 am (the official schedule says 3:40). The tickets that we had were not cheap, but I've never been packed so closely in with other people for an event before. Since it was so crowded, it was very, very hot. We took things that we could fan ourselves with and it was still hot. The section that we were in was concrete bleachers which isn't the softest thing to stand or sit on.
The thing that I was unprepared for was the scale of the whole event. On a night there are 6 Samba schools that parade down a street that's 700 m long. It takes them 50-60 minutes for the school to pass it's so long. For each school there's about 250-300 members of a band singing, and playing music while they are doing parading. They are singing one song the entire time with so much energy. The coolest part about the song? When they start the crowd joins in and sings and dances as well. I just can't describe the energy that you feel when the crowd and band are just so pumped up. If you want to get an idea of what the songs are, you can find them for each school and have a listen.
For each school I think that there was ~ 20 of the most fantastic floats that I have ever seen for each school. (Wikipedia say 6-8 floats, but I swear that there was more). The floats were not driven, but pushed by a group of guys. Dancers would be in the most impossible places on the floats: they must have been put on with a crane or lift or something. They'd be on a column that's 20 feet high, standing on a platform that looks 1 m round with nothing to hold on to except for what looks like 2 broom handles. No safety lines, nets, rails, anything. Of course they are dancing and singing and shaking the whole float as they go...
The energy, the songs, the colours... I had such a great time. Unfortunately we had been warned so much about the safety of Rio we didn't even risk taking our 4 year old digital point and shoot camera. We purchased a disposable but the pictures didn't turn out at all. Thankfully there's a bunch on flickr (Warning: the pic's might be NSFW) I really wish that we had taken a digital camera. I wish that we could have taken our new camera to be able to zoom in on the costumes, but there is no way that I would have felt comfortable taking it.
For the people that didn't go to the Sambadrome, they rationalized that they wouldn't have liked it. Some of the people that did go said "well, it's something that you do once in your life". Some said that next time they'll pay to be some of the dancers in the parade - such a cool idea. I really enjoyed it and would do it again, but paying for better seats. Since that's not possible every year, I thought that I'd just try and watch it on tv each year. When we got back to our room because we left "early" at ~ 2:30 am, we turned it on the tv and it really isn't the same. I was disappointed. You miss out on the energy watching it without being there. It's better than nothing, but it's just not the same.
If you ever find yourself with a chance to go to Rio during Carnival, take the opportunity. It really feels like no other party on earth.
No comments:
Post a Comment