Day 57: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

We had the most awesome day ever today! This morning, Bernardo and Marilia invited us to accompany them to another street parade to which we happily agreed. We met up with some of their relatives and, to let them share their carnival tradition with family, we split off and started exploring the parade by ourselves.

Us at Carnival Day 2

We were starving and crossed the street through cross dressers, samba dancers, and general revelers into a small cafe to grab a quick bite to eat. While we waited for our burgers, a fight between two really big men broke out. Lots of yelling ensued and one guy picked up a chair and took a swing at the other guy! The restaurant manager pulled it away from him. Then the chair guy pulled out a gun and started waving it around. People started screaming and running outside and the staff was freaking out. They closed down the cafe and somehow pulled the chair/gun guy outside and kept the other one inside while the cops were called. The manager pulled down the metal door to prevent any new customers or curious onlookers from getting in the mix and would only let patrons out of the restaurant after opening a tiny slot in the metal door to check for the crazy gun guy. We had just gotten our food and didn´t want to just leave it so we stood and ate at the bar during all the chaos trying our best to stay out of the way and were just leaving when the cops showed up. Pretty intense!

People in the streets

Fueled and ready for a long day of dancing in the streets with thousands of other people, we samba´ed our way through the masses. We came upon a moving parade behind a huge truck loaded with speakers and joined the long line of dancing people behind til, after several blocks, it stopped. As it happened, there was another truck with speakers and incredibly loud music just starting out heading the way we just came so we hopped in line behind it and went back to where we came. It was so much fun! In the crowd we passed was a group of 6 or 8 men dressed in full scuba gear and red wetsuits with glitter and each wearing a child´s inflatable ducky intertube around his waist. Awesome! Costumes range from anything you can imagine (yes anything) to regular street clothes.

We danced and walked and drank and danced some more all day til we just couldn´t move anymore! Caught a bus back to Copacabana to rest a bit and ended up taking the metro to see if we could score tickets to tonight´s parade in the Sambadrome. We found a ticket scalper who had tickets for Sector 5 who we bargained with from $60 and got him down to $30. There were stands and touts down by the beach in Copacabana that told us tonight´s parade was completely sold out and that we´d have to buy $100 tickets for the next night´s parade. So we got a pretty sweet deal, especially when we found out that several people around us in the same section paid between $60-$80!

Carnival Parade Float

Carnival Parade Float

Us at the Samba Parade

Carnival Costume

Carnival Parade

Carnival Float

Carnival Costumes

Carnival Costume

Carnival Float

Carnival Float

Carnival Costume

View down to Sambadrome, nearly 90,000 in attendance

 We had an incredible time watching the samba schools parade through with their fancy footwork and intricate costumes. We watched for 3 1/2 hours, about half way through the 4th school and then cut out to catch the metro back to Bernardo´s place. We didn´t get back til around 2:30am and felt really bad for waking up our wonderful host so late, but we really had so much fun today!