I’m sure some people go straight from the Sambódromo, where parades end around 6 a.m., to the first bloco of the day, invariably scheduled at 7 a.m.

But we’re not Brazilians and I don’t like Red Bull, so we went to bed in between. I still managed to get a four-hour night’s sleep. Not bad for Carnival!

Blocos started on Friday but the city wasn’t yet in full Carnival mode. On Saturday, it was. At 10:30 a.m., we headed to Centro for the megabloco that had started at 7 a.m. Even if you’re not fluent in Portuguese, you can safely assume that a megabloco is some kind of big bloco. É isso mesmo, I mean, exactly. A bloco turns into a megabloco when it’s 100,000 people or more. It can start at 7 a.m. without us, hundreds of thousands will still be there at 10 a.m., noon or later.

The Cordão da Bola Preta is the mother of all megablocos with about one million revellers taking over downtown Rio de Janeiro. It’s also the oldest bloco and this year, it was celebrating its 108th anniversary.

The story goes, that a group of friends were drunkenly talking about starting their own Carnival parade. A woman wearing a tight dress with large black polka dots walked by and encouraged them—the muse is long gone but the name remains and many revellers wear polka dots whatever.

I think this is one of the only blocos so far where I don’t have a picture of the crowd because it’s just spilling everything. The entire downtown Rio becomes a playground—and an interesting place to explore if you don’t mind gritty chaos.

We walked across downtown, then Lapa, Glória, and Catete—my favourite walk because you get to see another side of Rio, far from the more glamorous (or at least “polished”) South Zone.

Again, we’re not Brazilian so we rested for a couple of hours before another classic and one of the largest blocos—the Banda de Ipanema. Yes, in Ipanema.

We walked along Copacabana, made it to Ipanema right before sunset, and dove into the crowd once again.

How many hours of sleep do I get before the Sunday megabloco?