Carnival time

On Friday 16th February the keys of Rio de Janiero were given from the mayor to King Momo (king of the Carnival) and the Carnival was officially open. All the locals have a long weekend off work and the drinking began. The streets were full of vendors selling food and lots and lots of alcohol - mainly cans of Skol, but if you searched long enough you could also find the occassional can of Stella. For most residents of Rio, Carnival simply means getting a bank holiday and drinking on the streets. Very few get to see the floats and costumes as all parades go on within the Sambodrome.
The sambodrome is very similar to a giant runway with concrete stands on either side. The samba school compete here to win the title of best school. Each scool is allowed 90 mins to proceed from one end of the runway to the finishing line. Within this time they can send down as many floats or people as they wish. All the time they are being judged by a team of 40 judges sat along the runway. They are being judged on dancing, samba intrepretation, musical direction etc. As they are making their way down, a band and a singer usually towards the back of the procession are performing the song that has been specially written for that school for that year. This song is repeated for the entire 90 mins. As you can imagine at times this does get a little repetitive! On Sunday night I was seated towards the end of the Sambodrome watching the first 6 schools compete. The floats are so impressive - they are huge - you could hide an entire army within one. Some of them had obvious themes, wonders of the world, animals of Africa, Ancient Greece, Mayan Civilisations etc but some of them were down right bizarre. One was a giant lime green brain that every now and again fired glitter into the air! Most schools seemed to have around 7 floats each and alot of dancers. One school had over 5000 people in the parade. I was watching a sea of colour - they were so many dancers you could not make them out individually. One bonus of being sat near the finishing line was that I got to watch the floats exit the stadium. This was no easy task. It required a team effort. First the dancers at the top of these floats had to be lifted out by giant cranes. These cranes then had to dismantle the top sections of the floats and lift them over the walls - the rest of the float could then be pushed through the gates. Some of the schools with lots of floats created their own problems as the early floats could not be dismantled quickly enough before the rest of the floats caught up and created bottlenecks - you ended up with lots of dancers stuck with nowhere to go unable to cross the finishing line. If anything, person or float was not over the line after 90 mins the school got penalty points. As the night progressed the atmosphere within the Sambodrome got more and more electric - dancing and singing in the aisles was the norm - nobody was sat down to watch. Our group only lasted till half 3 - the parades continued on till 6am.
The sambadrome had schools competing on Monday night as well with the final results not announced till Wednesday - it takes that long to count them. I spent the rest of Carnival weekend drinking alot of Caprihinis and generally recovering. Oh, one thing they never mention on the telly about Carnival is the smell. Everyone is drinking on the streets - but there are no toilets so the street literally becomes an open sewer. Its not cleaned until the following Wednesday, 5 days later and what with the heat (at least mid 30´s every day) it is extremely unpleasant. One of my strongest memories of carnival will not be the costumes, the shootings on the way home from Sambadrome (tell you about that later) but the stench of the city. Such a shame because the costumes and the floats were amazing!