Carnival in Sao Paulo
I’ve decided Carnival is like a 5 years old’s birthday party, with expensive hallowe’en costumes, and a big dash of gay pride thrown in. All this is mixed together and marched down a runway for hours on end. Apparently somewhere along the way the start of lent is celebrated, but the only biblical reference I saw was the float containing the dancing bishops.
Just about everyone who talks about carnaval says Rio or Salvador are the only places to go. But when I was tempted with free accomodation and the company of some crazy Irish people I packed up and headed for Sao Paulo.
The crazy Irish people were Jenny, who I lived with in Peru, and her boyfriend Marty. Marty was over to learn Samba and Jenny came along for the tan. They were staying with some people, who knew some people, who had an empty apartment, and so I came to have my own pad for carnival.
In the lead up to the main event we sampled the local festivities with some street parties. My first taste of Brazillian street fun was held by the transgendered samba group. We went along and started grooving to the local beats. Said beats were coming from a converted skip on wheels. After an hour or so the tip took off down the road with a big band behind it and we marched along through the streets of Sao Paulo.
As crazy as following a massive trash holder through the streets seemed, nothing compared to the main event. After some hangling with touts, myself and Jenny managed to secure some tickets for the second night of the samba competition in the Samba Dome (whose real name sounds something like that, but I called it the Samba Dome).
This dome consisted of a long road, maybe a kilometre long, with stands on either side for us to stand and scream in. We got our headbands and words to our team, Via Via’s, song and headed in, rearing to go. Ten hours later we were still excited but a little less energetic when the last team finally danced on through.
In the ten hours we were there the teams had taken turns to put on a parade, each of an hour duration, followed by a 15 minute interval for us to get some equipment to become avid supporters of the next team. Everything; flags, song words, firecrackers, big white blow up things, were thrown into the crowd so we could all look like this team was our team. Part of the marks were going for getting the crowd moving so it helped when we had a flag to wave about. It amazed us that these people seemed to have no loyalty. They cheered for one gang for an hour, threw down their flags, picked up a new one and off they went again. They seemed to just want to cheer. We kept on our Via Via headbands the whole time and went nuts when they put on their display around 3am.
A parade usually started with a dance troop, followed but hundreds of people in a certain type of costume dancing, followed by hundreds of people in another costume dancing. Then during the show the team would have three floats. These were absolutely amazing. Not once did a float fail to make someone scream ”Look at that one!!”. They thought of just about every type of theme, one float was like a church, anther like a favela. One had what seemed to be the Village People, prancing around a drag queen. My personal favourite was the team who had the animal theme. Nothing beats seeing hundreds of men dressed up as penguins in the early hours of the morning. You just don’t get that in Cork.
By mid way through the show children, and some not so children, were dropping all over the place. One guy curled up on the stairs, another few slept on the benches. Seems everyone wanted to stay until the end but not everyone had the stamina. We on the other hand were still dancing when we walked out onto the main road around 7am trying to find a metro to bring us home. I had been worried we’d be finished to late to have a way home. In the end, it finished so late we could join the commuters in getting to the city centre!
Tags: Brazil, Carnival, Sao Paulo
