Samba De Janeiro!

9 March 2009By Zhu 16 Comments

Samba De Janeiro!

Even though we said we were not going, even though we had a great Carnival in Paraty… Once again, we made it to the Sambodromo in Rio de Janeiro for the last day of the Carnival.

We attended the Parade of the Champions, featuring the best samba schools in Rio, who had the whole night to show off. We took the subway to the stadium, with — it seemed — half of Rio. A lot of performers were already wearing their customs in the subway, and I got a hug from two ¨golden guys¨ who put glitters all over me.

We did not have any tickets for the show, but we knew that chances are, we could find something in the 90,000 seats stadium. It only took us about 30 minutes to buy some cheap tickets from scalpers ($5 each!) for sector 13, the popular stand at the end of the parade. Good enough for us!

The place was packed. We sat on concrete benches and we were glad to see we actually had a good view on the parade down there. It took each school about 1:20 minutes to walk the whole sambodromo, and we left exhausted at 3:00 am. But what a show!