Carnival 2008

Carnival - I've seen it, I think I can come home now!

So it was carnival weekend in Brazil, and guess what we did? Mostly sit around watching tv... haha. I mean, we went to carnival!! Mariannik, Peter and myself planned on going to Sao Paulo for Carnival. It was great! I was so happy to get out of boring old Guaruja. Nothing happens here, and theres nobody our age to hang out with!

We left friday morning on the bus to Sao Pàulo and met up with Peter at the hotel. It was so great to see him again, and I was really happy to have him on the adventures with us. We decided that we should go try to find tickets for the nights events. Carnival is usually this parade thing, but in Sao Paulo its held in a place called the Sombadrome. We didn~t have tickets to go, so we decided to see if the ticket booths had any left, or maybe we could get some from some scalpers. We went to the statium, and the scene was scary. There were tons of scalpers, and the lonely planet book was right... you don't need to find them, cause they'll find you!

After being harassed by a few of them, with sketchy tickets, we decided to leave. It was probably a good thing, seeing as there was two men agruing across the street, and one seemed to have a gun. We got out of there.

We decided to grab dinner at a little resturant with an outside padio. One of the other customers sitting at a table next to us brought over a note to Mariannik. It was a love note, with his phone number on it. Eventually we got to talking to one of the guys. He spoke english well enough, and we asked if there was anything going on that night or if he knew where we could get tickets. He kindly advised us to go on to a website named http://www.google.com/ and type in "Sao Paulo Carnival".... Boy was he smart! After not taking his advice and trying to get out of there to find our own tickets, we decided to head back to the Sambadrome to try our luck. We found a scalper, and he was a pretty decent guy. He got us tickets in A section, and even walked us (the mile long distance) to the gate to be sure that we made it in ok. We ended up paying 100 reals for a 50 real ticket, but in canadian funds that was like paying 60 dollars for a 30 dollar ticket. Not too bad, and it was last minute.

We got in ok, and the place was bumpin. There is a long street with stands lining the sides, and each Samba School has a dance and a song they play over and over again until everyone in their group (say 1000 or so) is finished walking down the road. The have different groups of costumes and usually are lead by a huge float with people dancing on top. Its really sketchy to watch everyone dancing on them, because the entire float shakes with the footsteps of the people, so there always seems to be a chance that someone might fall to their death. This in my opinion, makes the show even that much better!

Its really neat, they wear different costumes, and the songs are catchy. The crowd dances and sings, and drinks beer. This lasts till about 4 in the morning, but we didn't stay that long.

We did however make some friends. The first was a group of three people who were in the parade, but now hanging out in the stands to watch the rest of the show. They were from Rio and had come uThey had their full costumes and let us try them on! How cool do we look!

The second friend was the Global TV reporter, so did an interview with us on TV!! Our coworkers saw it and everything. We are going to try to find the link to see it. Here's a pic of me and the reporter.. I am WAY too happy, as you can tell!

After a few hours, we were exhausted. We had been walking all day long, and our legs were killing us. We went back to the hotel and slept.. a lot. The next day we walked around the city, found a book store, and went to the area that the lonely planet book said was a bad place to go.

** Ok, since I keep getting terrified msgs from friends and family members, I would like to clarify that the lonely planet book said that the bad place to go was a neighbour hood next to where we were, and said that it was dangerous at night time... we were in the middle of the day with lots of people shopping and walking around, it wasn't bad... however***

I was scared, (without good reason to be) but the second we walked out of the subway, some boy with no shoes hasseled Peter for money, I was set that I wanted out of that place. It was actually really beautiful. There were parks, and nice archetecture, and I think I might have really enjoyed it if it weren't for the stupid lonely planet book killing my courage.