Carnival Queens!

Our first taste of Rio Carnival was Friday night when we donned out carnival masks and headed down to Ipanema. 

 

Feeling cheeky and ready to party!

There are two events during carnival week; the official street carnival at the Sambadrome, and the unofficial street parties or “blocos” that happen all over the city.  Both are centred around samba schools that parade around the streets, playing music and dancing, but the official parade is on a very different scale, as we were to find out.  As soon as you go out of your house during carnival week, you can’t ignore the party atmosphere; people are dressed up in costume everywhere and enjoying themselves loudly.

When we got out of the metro (which once again puts the London system to shame) we encountered a very scary scene.  Teenagers drunk everywhere, sucking each other’s faces off, falling over, shouting drunken abuse, it was like being in Brighton centre on a Friday night.  It was not the carnival we were hoping for!  Luckily, this was an exception and not the rule and soon we had found a much more sociable (and mature) bunch of people – we had found the gay centre of town!  We sat in an outside cafe that was cordoned off from the road by a barricade.  Here, we could happily sip caipirinhas and meet people on the other side of the barricade with a safety barrier in between us.  At other times during our trip it would have been nice to have a constant safety barrier around us! Whilst we sat watching the half naked men around us dancing to the samba beats, the only people we knew in Rio walked past – our fellow house guests Joanna and Bernard.  Small world!  We drank with them before heading home for an early night (about 2am) ready for the big carnival day ahead of us.

The next day we woke to the sound of rain, and it didn’t let up all day long.  Sara and I had presumed that Carnival in Rio would be hot and sunny – how wrong we were.  Within about an hour of walking in the rain, our legs and flip-flopped feet were muddy and wet, and our hair beneath our carnival masks was soaked.  We walked up the hill towards Santa Teresa at about 10.30am and decided there was only one thing to do… drink.  We started with Smirnoff Ice (we are too girly to drink beer and this was the only other option), but by mid afternoon we had moved on to caipirinhas.  The weather was miserable, but the people were happy, drunk and dancing.

Something you might wonder about is; with all that drinking and dancing in the street, where do people go to the toilet?  Well, civilised people queue for the portaloos, which are luxury compared to those at Glastonbury.  We discovered what the less civilised type of person does, just as we walked towards a restaurant for lunch.  There, right in front of us on a busy road, was a grown woman (about 50 years old) squatting in front of a parked car and urinating.  We averted our eyes (like proper ladies) only to see another woman next to her pulling up her knickers, from that point on, as we approached the restaurant, everywhere we looked there was a woman or man urinating.  And Sara and I were wearing flip-flops! 

At the restaurant, we had a lovely meaty lunch, sitting next to a large hairy man dressed in a pink leotard and tutu.  If that wasn’t enough another man walked in with his father (making presumptions here, it could have been a different relationship!), and the younger man was wearing a complete bunny girl outfit.  He was a stocky stubbly man in his twenties with glasses, and he was wearing a skimpy leotard, fish net tights, bow tie, long black gloves, and bunny ears.  The leotard left nothing to the imagination.  He sat down with his father and seemed to have a very serious conversation, with nothing strange in the fact he was dressed like a female tart!  It was very amusing.

That afternoon we followed the blocos of Lapa and Cinelandia, and then headed to the gay bar where we felt safe.  Being blonde in Rio brings quite a bit of unwanted attention, especially during carnival, and so it was nice to relax somewhere where we were going to be ignored, not that we were ignored, and within a few minutes we had made some firm friends.  With our new bunch of 8 gay friends we felt confident hitting the streets of Copacabana, and here we danced along the sea front, with little hassle, Carnival queens with a bunch of queens!

We got home that evening at about 1am after 14 hours of partying.  We were exhausted and tumbled into our blow up mattress for a couple of hours sleep.  Did Newton discover his first law whilst sharing a blow-up mattress???  Here is a picture of how disgusting my feet were after carnival that day:

The next day was a big day for our host Cris.  It was her birthday and 30 people from her family were coming round to celebrate.  I got to use my limited Portuguese to all of them “Hello”, “I don’t speak Portuguese”, and “It was a pleasure to meet you”.  They were all lovely people, and although I was somewhat limited in my ability to communicate it was a lovely afternoon spent with a very kind and loving family.

That evening, although we were exhausted, we decided to try and get tickets to the official part of the Rio Carnival; the parade at the Sambadrome.  We arrived at the metro station to be met by a mix of policemen, ticket touts, vendors selling costumes and drinks, and party goers.  The sambadrome is in a poor area of Rio and was quite intimidating at first, but then you realize that everyone is in carnival spirits and is there for the same reasons, either to have fun, or to make money out of the tourists!  We were approached by several ticket touts and ignored all of them until we saw a trustworthy-looking man.  We were ready to bargain hard, all of our Brazilian friends said we would be paying hundreds of Reais for a ticket.  However, the man only wanted 50 reais (about 18 pounds) and agreed to walk us to the stand, and so we agreed.  There was an orderly queue at the entrance to our sector and once inside (yipee – the tickets were real!) we were handed free programmes and a triple pack of condoms!

So, what happens in the Sambadrome?  Well, there are nine different sectors of concrete stands that surround a long stretch of road.  Each Samba school starts it’s parade with a set of fireworks at one end, and then their particular song is blasted out along the whole stretch.  They start dancing and moving up the street from sector to sector and it takes about an hour for one samba school to go from one end to the other.  It is huge, and extravagant and over the top and you can’t help but dance, it’s contagious!  Also the song for each samba school plays continuously until the samba school has passed all the sectors (well over an hour) and so even if you don’t speak portuguese, you are singing along by the end.  During the performances vendors walk around the stands selling cold drinks and burgers so that you don’t have to leave your seat.  I had a very embarrassing moment when I went to pay an elderly man for my can of drink and instead of pulling cash out of my pocket, I threw three condoms at him!  He must have thought he was being propositioned.

My favourite samba school was Sao Clemente, and to this day I am still singing the song.  Take a look at their performance:

We watched three samba schools parade past before we headed home at about 2am.  There were three more schools to parade but we had partied long and hard since arriving in Rio, and we had a flight the next morning.  We were basically dead on our feet.  Carnival is so much fun, and a complete sensory overload, but it is exhausting.  Leaving carnival is a bit like leaving Glastonbury, it is so much fun, but you desperately need some sleep and a wash!  The next day we had booked a last minute flight to Campo Grande in the Pantanal where we were going to have a four day tour of the jungle, were we ready for the jungle???  Let’s look at the facts… Sara had never worn walking boots before and had also never slept in a sleeping bag, we were in for a treat!