Samba-ing the night away

This is our 100th entry on the blog.

Well the big news from Rio is that I actually managed to stay up all night to watch the Sambadrome. In fact we were the last of the Dragoman people to leave. We were there til the bitter end. The last pic is of us staggering into the hotel for breakfast.

I thought the Sambadrome would be like a big stadium or be like an openair G-mex type thing. But it´s actually just a piece of road, 1km long with concrete stands along it, and they just shut the road off for Carnaval.

The Sambadrome is a REALLY big deal for people from Rio. Each favella has a Samba school, which isn´t actually a dance school it´s more of a social club/comunity centre / co-operative type thing. Each Samba School puts on a parade, the top 13 schools compete at the Sambadrome on the Sun and monday of carnaval. Each school has an hour and 15 mins to samba down the Sambadrome.

Each parade has about 3000 people in it, 5 massive floats. They all follow the same format, with a mixture of individual dancers, drummers and marching groups. Each school chooses a theme and has a song, which they all sing as they samba along. Some of the themes last night were a bit tenuous: Metamorphasis, the future in the past but others were a bit easier to work our, like games and the portugese language around the world. Anyway, the result is a magnificent show. There must be a lot of naked ostriches in the world at the moment.

The games one was really good, they even had a football pitch made up of people in green costumes sambering down the strip, 22 of them had lifesized footballers strapped to their heads, and one person had a ball on their head, so the players and the ball all ran about above the field of green bodies having a game, it looked amazing. The ball ran into the net just as it passed us. It was like gigantic subuteo.

We were in a stand right by the finishing line. When the dancers finish, they strip off their costumes and just throw them away! If you were persistant you could beg a costume off a dancer. Someone in our group snagged an outfit, here´s me modeling it in the first pic.

It was a night we´ll never forget.