Blocos

Saturday, February 2, 2008 – Day 45

This is when Carnaval starts to kick into high gear, though the biggest nights are Sunday and Monday. There are bunches and bunches of local street parades called “blocos” or block parties, and they take place all across the city. I went to the Simpatica e Quase Amor bloco yesterday. It simply gathers at a park off Ipanema Beach, and just stays there. The crowd is probably +/- 5,000. A small samba band plays on the street corner, people are dressed in various costumes and dancing in the street, while dozens of entrepreneurial locals are selling beer, water, and hot dogs right there on the street.

Today, the Banda Ipanema bloco is supposed to start around 4:00 pm. It meets at the same park as yesterday’s bloco, and then parades down Avenida Vieria Souto, the main drag of Ipanema - it’s a six-land divided street running, right along the beach. I took the first photo at about 6:00 pm. These people are literally just stepping off the sand, and getting ready to watch the parade, or join in as it passes by.

The wild part is that there is no real theme to the parade except for the specific samba song they have chosen to sing. There are no floats, no plastic beads are thrown about, and there is no real sense of organization. Everyone just gathers in the street until the crowd gets so big, that it just starts to move on its own. As you can see in the pictures, there are literally tens of thousands of people marching. Drag queens, people in their swim suits, people dressed in other costumes, families with kids, grandparents, literally anybody and everybody participates in these parades. The Banda Impanema bloco is one of the largest and most popular, and they will do this again on Tuesday. Some of the blocos no longer publish a starting time because they have become too big for the areas in which they parade. It’s kind of hard to miss, however, when hundreds and then thousands have started to gather on the street corner.

Anyone with a cooler can sell beer on the side of the street, and there are hundreds people selling. A can of beer sells for R$1.89 in the grocery store, and R$2.00 on the street (just over US$1.00) – a pretty efficient market. At 3 beers for R$5.00, it’s actually cheaper to buy your beer on the street than from a grocery store. As you can see from the pictures, there are actually large trucks in the middle of the parade that are just there to sell more beer to the people that are IN the parade!

This parade was probably about a mile long, and as it finished, the scavengers followed right behind, picking up every beer can, plastic bottle, and piece of paper that was left behind. Ten minutes after the parade, the street is completely clean. Amazing. And throughout the entire parade, I think I saw a total of 4 policemen.

Afterwards, I met a couple of girls from, of all places, Costa Mesa. One has a brother that got married to a Brazilian girl a week ago. They came for the wedding, and then decided to stay for an extra day or two and take in a little bit of Carnaval. Their flight is at 7:00 am tomorrow morning, and since is the only day of Carnaval that they are going to see, it’s going to be a big one.
We got some dinner, drank a bunch of ciprihanas (the Brazilian equivalent of a mojito), cleaned up a bit, and then went out on the town for the rest of the evening/morning. I think they made their flight, but I’m not really sure.