Carnaval!

Mon., Feb 4 – Day 49

The two biggest days of Carnaval are the Sunday and Monday before Fat Tuesday. Each night, 6 of the 12 Special Samba Schools will parade down the Sambodromo – a 70,000 seat, mile-long stadium built specifically for Carnaval. Each school is made up of 4,000 to 6,000 people, and they really do compete. A samba school is generally associated with a particular favela, or neighborhood, and there are many more than just the 12 Special Schools. The Special Schools are the top division, but there are other divisions also. And to keep the pressure on, they use a relegation system like the English rugby leagues where the bottom two in the top division are relegated down, and the top two schools in the second division are relegated up.

There’s a huge sense of pride among the people and the favelas in keeping their school in the top category, and they work year-round on the effort. Each school has a “queen”, which is a very high honor, and most will also have a celebrity participant. Anyone, however, can actually participate in the parades. As a fund-raising device, the schools sell spots in the parade for +/- US$400 and up. The lowest price gets you a basic costume and you become one of the masses that create color and motion around the floats. For more money, you get a more elaborate costume and more prominent position. For these spots, though, you usually have to submit a picture and audition to show that you know what you’re doing. The downside of being in the parade is that you have to leave the Sambodromo as soon as your school finishes. You don’t get to stay and see the other parades unless you have purchased another ticket. You also have to spend a couple hours at a practice session (the regular members of the school have been practicing every Saturday since September, and they don’t want you to blow it for them), and then you have to be at the Sambodromo a couple hours before your parade time for staging. Spots are limited and sell out quickly, so you have to plan ahead. As a first-timer, I’m glad that I chose to watch, but next time I’m going to be in the parade.

The regular tickets for the Sambodromo also sell out quickly. Someone told me this year’s tickets sold out in less than ½ an hour. Two tourist agencies are given an allocation of tickets to sell to foreigners, and these are marked up about 100% (or more) from what the locals pay. I looked at the two web sites, and the cheap seats were running about US $300 per night. The agencies both state that they are the only legitimate sources for tickets, and that buying from scalpers is illegal and dangerous. Buying from any another agency is supposedly even more expensive because they would be marking up from these agencies’ prices. Reading some travel blogs, I learned that there does seem to be an active scalpers market, but that it’s hard to make a deal unless you speak Portuguese as the criminal element rarely spends time learning another language. Since I’m there for both nights, I figure I’ll take my chances with the scalpers on the first night, then pay through the nose the second night if I get shut out (or arrested).

I forgot that the first night was Super Bowl Sunday. I watched the game at the Marriott on Copacabana with a flight crew from United Airlines, so looks like it’s going be all or nothing with the scalpers. On Monday evening I talk to a cab driver who says he wants R$75.00 to take me to the Sambodromo and R$150.00 to bring me back home. On both Carnaval nights, all the cab drivers work on a flat fee based on the area you coming from or going to. So I decided that I’d take the subway for R$4.80 (both ways). Anyway, how dangerous can the Rio subway be at 4:00 am for a non-Portuguese speaking white guy that’s never used the system?

I exit the train station a couple blocks from the Sambodromo, and once again, everyone that owns a small cooler is selling beer. Others have set up their little hibachis and are selling some sort of meat on a stick for R$1.00. I walked around a bit, then picked out a spot near an entry gate and just sort of stood there. Looking like an obvious tourist, the scalpers started coming up to me and saying, “grass?” At first, I thought they were selling dope, which was somewhat startling since there were not only a lot of police around, but a lot of heavily armed military types as well. It turns out that what they were actually saying was “ingres” (Portuguese for ingress, or enter, with the accent on the last syllable), it’s their word for ticket. OK, now I can start bargaining.

The first parade had already started, and one guy says that he has a ticket for R$700.00. It’s a good seat, but I tell him that I only have R$50.00. He offered a seat in another section for R$300.00, and I told him again that I only had R$50.00. Another scalper comes over, and I tell him the same story. A few minutes later, the first guy comes back, speaks better English and drops his prices a little. I told him that I only wanted to see one parade, and that otherwise, it just wasn’t that big a deal to me. Then I bought a beer from the a standing next to me. About 15 minutes later, he comes up with another seat for $50.00. I’ve looked at a seating chart, and know that these are complimentary tickets that are given to locals that have a connection to a school. They are at the end of the Sambodromo, so it’s not a prime seat, but hey, the price is right. So I offered $30.00. He countered at R$35.00, and I told him “OK, R$35.00, but you have to buy me a beer”. Sold!

Once inside, I met a couple of cute girls from London. They said they paid 100 pounds each for their tickets. I’m getting along well with them and a friend theirs, an Australian guy with a spike in his lip, comes up and joins the conversation. He made some kind of comment to one of the girls about me being old, but I couldn’t make it all out. He’s a twenty-something knucklehead staying in a crappy hostel and after complaining about the poor condition of his “accommodations” asked me about my hotel. I told him “Well, it is on the beach. But I’ve also got three pools, a swim-up bar, a golf course, and a helicopter landing pad. So, it’s pretty nice”. Then, just for kicks, I said “If you plan on keeping that piece of metal in your lip, you might just have to get used to the current standard of your living conditions”. He didn’t seem to get my point, but the English girls did.

Being a forty-something knucklehead, I left my camera battery in the charger at the hotel. Amanda said I could download some of her pictures, but otherwise, I’m sure that it’s easy enough to find a few pictures on the web, or a video on YouTube, and I encourage you to have a look. Each parade starts with a massive fireworks display. Then, each school has a time limit of one hour and fifteen minutes to make it from one end of the Sambodromo to the other.

The parades are truly an amazing thing to see. The parade lane is probably 20 yards wide and white. It gets swept clean after each school. The whole thing is lit up like a stage with searing white light, which makes all the colors of the costumes and floats seem electric. Though all of the colors and sounds were spectacular, the floats and the stadium seemed a little smaller in person than they do on TV.

Around the Sambodromo, kids pass out triangular paper fans that also have the words to each school’s samba song printed on them. A lot of the people have been practicing the songs for weeks and know them by heart, but the really cool thing is that everyone stands, sings, and dances to the songs for the full duration of the parade. And not just for the parade of their favorite school, but for ALL of the parades.

Starting at about 9:30 pm, with six parades and a bit of an intermission for clean-up between each one, the final parade finishes at a bout sunrise. I left at about 4:00 am, picking up a couple of R$1.00 kabobs on my way to the subway. The subway is actually very safe, clean, and efficient, and it runs 24 hours per day during Carnaval.