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selenakWell, I'm back, safe and sound. And before I take off to have lunch, here's the first part of my promised travelogue which I typed ever since arriving. In return, I ask for some update - did I miss any kerfuffles or particular good stories? For all I know, entire revolutions have come and gone in fandoms - ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
paratti could have declared her unlimited love for Buffy, altariel1 could have written a Faramir and Denethor comedy fluff story, nostalgia_lj could have founded the Supporters of Gul Dukat fan club, hobsonphile could have abandoned Vir in favour of writing Marcus/Ivanova songfic (which would put me in really tight spot because I have said that then I'd write John/Delenn fluff) and I would not have known. Please tell.
We landed with surprising little jet lag, probably because thanks to a sleeping pill we did manage to catch some sleep on the flight (a rare thing for me). Moreover, the time difference between Rio and Germany is only four hours, which contributede to the vague feeling we hadn’t left Europe at all.
Unfortunately, the queue at immagrations was rather long…. But not as long as the one for US Citizens. You see, a while ago one of Dubya’s minions decided that Brazilians entering the US were supposed to leave fingerprints. The Brazilians retaliated by making it a duty for all US citizens, but only US citizens, to get fingerprinted as well when entering Brazil. The rest of the world is dealt with as usual, which means visa for Canadians, and just a stamp and a wave-through for E.U. members, to which yours truly belongs. Now if it were Bush & Co. that suffered, I’d be amused by that particular tit for tat, but harmless US travellers who in all likelihood didn’t even vote for the guy certainly don’t deserve it. (And I bet it’s not constructive to the Brasilian economy, since the Americans bring cash into the country.)
Anyway. Here we were, having passed customs, driving to the Copacabana where our hotel was going to be. This (and the parallel drive back after the end of the carneval when we left for Salvador de Bahia) afforded us our only view to the slums of Rio de Janeiro. Otherwise, we stayed away from them, being neither suicidal nor masochistically inclined. From what I could see, they reminded me more of Israel (the way the poorer Palistinians live) than of India; the tiny, crammed, mostly unfinished houses, build ant-nest like one over the over are made of (unpainted) brick, not of metal. Also, in India you find the poor right next door to the rich; not so in Brazil – Brasil? (I’ve seen both spellings) – where they are kept far apart.
The famous Copacabana, obviously, is an area for the rich. Basically, you could all it a beach promenade. All the beaches in Brazil are justly famous. Imagine this beach, and the wide street next to ist, tourists and Brasilians intermingling, most in shorts and/or, if they’re female, in bikinis. The entire country must have declared war on the bathing suite; I certainly was the only woman I saw wearing one. When I say “bikini”, add mentally “at least two sizes too small for the breasts if it isn’t a tourist”, and you get the picture. Also, the slips aren’t nicknamed “teeth silk” for nothing. Now the glorious and charming thing about this is that the Brasilians aren’t a nation of models with top figures. No, there are stout ones, lean ones, old ones, middle-aged ones, downright fat ones, plumb kids, scrawny kids – and they all walk around, feeling entirely easy in their own bodies. Since it was carneval time, you met a small group of dancers every now and then, and the people around joined and danced to the samba rhythm.
Other noteworthy features of this beach promenade: the massages. In Italy, you find shoeshine services offered; here, there were masseurs offering half an hour or an hour of a massage right then and there. Also, about every two hundred meters, there was a quick shower dispenser, not so much to clean yourself but to get refreshed. The heat and the humidity was enormous. No hawkers and no beggars after the wealthy, which was a remarkable contrast to India and other cities with millions of people in them. Sand sculptures, from the traditional sand castle to nudes. They were only there for about two days; on the third, I saw them destroyed, renewed, and formed into something else.
Now, originally the only official carneval event we had tickets for was the Sambadrome on Sunday evening. As spectators, naturally. Having arrived on Saturday morning, we collected our tickets and got into a chat with the guy who delivered them. The fateful question “if this was your first and probably only time in Rio, what would you do, and what is still possible” was asked.
This resulted in the following: tickets for the ball at the Copacabana Palace Hotel that same (Saturday) evening, the permission to walk in one of the parades at the Sambadrome on Monday night. And a mad dash to get costumes. You see, we hadn’t brought any. The costumes for the parade weren’t for us to choose – the Samba schools who offer this chance for visitors give them their spare costumes for whichever part the procession they can be fit in – but the ball, the most famous of the country, no less, had a certain theme: Africa. Which is fine if you’re a bronzed goddess anyway, but here we were, two pale Germans fresh from our snowy home. Thanks to the boutique of the Copacabana Palace Hotel (which incidentally is the oldest of the block – think white colonial Villa where governors or drug lords could reside, or both, and certainly plenty of movie stars), we ended up which something vaguely African. Sort of. My dress consisted of leopard-patterned silk and was cut like a Greek chiton, leaving one shoulder bare. Having had visions of the Brazilian crime scene, I had not brought any real jewelry along, safe two things – fake pearls, and the dreamcatcher I had bought in Louisiana when visiting the States two years ago. So I put the dreamcatcher around my neck and wrapped the fake pearl necklace around my left arm. Together with an outrageous feathery headpiece and my sandals this looked well enough that I wasn’t booed when I walked down the red carpet to enter the Copacabana Palace later that night. Which you have to do, with lots of onlookers cheering or whistling, depending on their impression.
They had decorated the Hotel fitting the “Africa” theme with giant paper zebras, lots of palms and drums, and of course many hired performers – drummers, acrobats, you name it, they had it. Most costumes were gorgeous. Leopards were quite in fashion, but some smart people had figured out that technically, Egypt belonged to Africa as well, and had donned the Cleopatra or Tutanchamon look. As I said before, for every long-legged creature with flat abs, there were five Rubens goddesses or weighty chieftains cheerfully flaunting their imperfections. And no age limit. You had people in their 50s, 60s and 70s dancing the Samba with the same enthusiasm – and the same incredible high heels – that the 20-30 age class did. A lot of security folk abounded, mostly due to the presence of Bill Gates and some other prominent people. They either wore smokings or had gone African as well, which allowed me to judge that their bare-breasted appearance spoke well for gymnastics whithin the security force.
Last years famous American guest, we had been told, had been Barbara Bush, though to everyone’s relief this year none of the Bush family decided to grace the carnival with their presence. I tried to imagine any of them on the overcrowded dancing floor with mostly naked people dancing the samba with increasing frenzy, but my brain went on strike there. My other think puzzle of the evening was to figure out how one of the solo dancers, whose costume consisted solely of paint on her breasts and above her vagina and nothing else, and who transpired as everyone else did, kept that paint intact instead of having it dissolve in sweat. Must be some special mixture.
Present in considerable numbers and usually wearing more elaborate costumes were lots and lots of transvestites. That same day, there had been a drag queen competition, and I guessed some of the winners (because the costumes were really gorgeous) showed up at this party. For some reason or the other, each time we took a break to catch some air on the balcony and drink some water we invariably ended up in one of the spots for the drag queens relaxed. I was fascinated to see that they didn’t go for the huge breasts I had seen transvestites flout in Berlin; theirs in Rio were usually small. They had obviously mastered the art of dancing on high heels together with everyone else, and the huge feathery headgears, which pull one’s hair back, emphasized their bone structure and put a note on the androgynous look.
The next day, after sleeping for an hour or two (these holidays were not in any ways connected to slumber, let me tell you that), we went on with the sightseeing. Rio has some spectacular natural landscape, aside from the long, long beaches. Mountains, both with forest and with houses, the famous sugar loaf (though if you ask me, it looks more like a beehive than a sugar loaf), and the huge concrete statue of Jesus overlooking the city, his arms spread white open – in blessing, some say; in helplessness, say others. There are glass and steel skyscrapers as in every modern city. To find the older houses, one has to go to the quarter St. Teresa, which we did, using an ancient streetcar from which people hung rather alarmingly. The houses in St. Teresa don’t contain more than one or two floors, and in their pastel colours – faded pink, blue and yellow – and Iberian colonial style let you imagine what the city must have looked like till the start of the 20th century. The modern city centre has one or two old houses between eight or so modern ones as well, looking as incongruous there as they in New York or Shanghei. It amused me to see the cinemas playing “Lord of the Rings”, the entire trilogy, mind you. And this was before the Oscars. The harbor had one big (literary) attraction for ship fanatics – the “Queen Mary II”, the largest ship of the world these days, more twice the size of the Titanic. I have to confess gigantic ships don’t talk to me. Old wooden ships, yes; I can watch them intensively both in the museum and in the water. But these exercises in gigantism just get a shrug from me. My companion, however, was delighted.
My favourite view of the city: came on Sunday morning, when we went up to the Sugar Loaf. It was a bit cloudy and misty, but every now and then the sun and wind drove the clouds away. Which meant that once you were up there, you felt like discovering Brigadoon, or the lost Atlantis. Fog, and then suddenly green islands – the hills – or houses, or beaches, or the sea, appearing in the mist and dissappearing again. Breathtaking.
On Sunday Night, we went to an exercise of gigantism which did talk to me. The Sambadrome is constructed along the lines of the Circus Maximus, two lengthy parallel lines, only without the connecting curves on both ends. The parades that march through there are really competitions of the most famous dancing schools of the country. Now, consider: each parade contained between 3500 (minimum number requested) and 5000 (maximum number allowed) participants. Each parade, by itself, outshone, in the spectacle of costumes, wagons and dancing anything one sees at home (meaning my country, Germany) during carneval put together. And there are seven parades in one night. You feel like a spectator of a Roman triumph. The air on those tribunes might get worse and worse, and your ears ring with all the drumming, singing and shouting, but you can’t tear yourself away. And this holds true for all kind of spectators. Those in the expensive places, who had roofs over their heads, were as wildly moving along with the rhythm and cheering as those who risked the sky. (And it had briefly rained earlier that evening, but only for half an hour or so.) Each parade was announced by invidiual fireworks, and then needed about 90 minutes to move through the arena. There were solo dancers, on the wagons and between groups, dancers forming small groups, and then the huge armies of dancers just doing the basic samba steps, singing along and forming a contingent. Each Samba school had a theme – “Fantasy”, for example, and it amused me to see lots of Gandalfs dancing along, followed by a group in Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s Creature makeup, followed by delicate winged Victorian elfs who would have driven Tolkien insane. Or “Science”. Cue a wagon constructed around an atomic model, and really underdressed but over-feathered Einsteins. Or “Ancient Rome”. You get the picture.
The next night, we got to experience the other side of this splendour. The Samba School who had agreed to let us tag along was Mucidade, and its theme for the competition was “Education and Traffic”. Now, we got to march in the last group. Which was supposed to present rather imaginative stop signs. I do have a digital picture; once I work out how, I’ll post it. For now, I’ll do my best to describe it: Firstly, you got into your form-fitting jumpsuit of yellow and black stripes. Then, you slipped into your gigantic – and I really mean gigantic – shoulder piece. About three times the size of what a Rugby or American football player wears. On this, you got the equally gigantic and feathered sign PARE, which is Portuguese for STOP. And then you got your head covered with a striped hat that looked like something you hit at bowling.
Oviously, wearing all of this, you don’t fit in a taxi, or for that matter in any other car. So we took the metro, only partly dressed (meaning we still wore the hats and the PARE sign in our hands or under our arms respectively). And then went, like the dutiful Germans we are, to the Sambadrome two hours before our school was scheduled to start their parade, as we had been told to do. Because you know, we are, like, punctual.
There were a lot of other costumed people heading for the same direction in the metro, but we didn’t see people wearing “our” school’s emblem until arriving there; “there” being not the front entrance, obviously, but the backstage area which was on the open street behind the Sambadrome and went on for miles. It was around half past midnight. Watching another school getting ready, which was interesting in itself, we met a nice girl named Tita who was in charge of helping with the organization, and also happened to be fluent in English. We chatted; she explained that their parade, which had been supposed to start at 2:30 am, would not be able to start until 4:30, so after watching some more, we joined her and she took us to the workshop, an abandoned factory. (Classic K’immie territory, thought the Highlander fan in me) There, Mucidade had set up temporary quarters; the soloists got their costumes fitted, and crowd people like us relaxed and hung out while waiting, able to shelve the heavy shoulder pieces.
Going with Tita turned out to have been an inspired idea, because it started to rain. We assumed it would pass, like the other time, after half an hour or so. Fat chance. An hour later, it still rained. And rained. And rained. At around five o’clock, we had no choice but to go out in the rain and rally behind each other, waiting and getting wet. Thank God for Brazilian heat, thought I, even as Tita declared this was the coldest night of her entire life. Incidentally, shoes were part of the costume as well – red cloth shoes – and they had turned wet quicker than anything else.
“Now, remember,” Tita said, “you must laugh and dance the entire time, otherwise we’ll lose points from the jurors. And sing. If you don’t know the words of the song, just sing anything, it will drown in the mass anyway.”
Finally, around 6:30, the sun having risen behind thick clouds with unrelenting rain, the last fireworks announced our parade. We set in motion. My sun-burned shoulder ached. But hey. It was a once in a life time opportunity. And as we started dancing, the wet clothes weren’t that important anymore. I did wonder how many people would still be left watching us, after a night of rain.
As it turned out, the tourists were mostly gone, but the Brasilians? Had actually remained and were greeting the Mucidade troopers with cheers. The rain-sheltered places were packed and there, they were dancing. But even in the rows exposed to rain, there were these people, dancing to the beat of Samba or cheering us on. Well, the least one can do was to beam and dance away.
“Pare!” I shouted. “Vieni!” Which were the only two words of the song I knew, and then I went on “la la di la do la di a la la la” and danced on the wet cement, with the feathers of my shoulder and headgear being soaked through and making me look like a bedraggled mad bird.
And this was only the start of my Brazilian adventure.
paratti could have declared her unlimited love for Buffy, altariel1 could have written a Faramir and Denethor comedy fluff story, nostalgia_lj could have founded the Supporters of Gul Dukat fan club, hobsonphile could have abandoned Vir in favour of writing Marcus/Ivanova songfic (which would put me in really tight spot because I have said that then I'd write John/Delenn fluff) and I would not have known. Please tell. We landed with surprising little jet lag, probably because thanks to a sleeping pill we did manage to catch some sleep on the flight (a rare thing for me). Moreover, the time difference between Rio and Germany is only four hours, which contributede to the vague feeling we hadn’t left Europe at all.
Unfortunately, the queue at immagrations was rather long…. But not as long as the one for US Citizens. You see, a while ago one of Dubya’s minions decided that Brazilians entering the US were supposed to leave fingerprints. The Brazilians retaliated by making it a duty for all US citizens, but only US citizens, to get fingerprinted as well when entering Brazil. The rest of the world is dealt with as usual, which means visa for Canadians, and just a stamp and a wave-through for E.U. members, to which yours truly belongs. Now if it were Bush & Co. that suffered, I’d be amused by that particular tit for tat, but harmless US travellers who in all likelihood didn’t even vote for the guy certainly don’t deserve it. (And I bet it’s not constructive to the Brasilian economy, since the Americans bring cash into the country.)
Anyway. Here we were, having passed customs, driving to the Copacabana where our hotel was going to be. This (and the parallel drive back after the end of the carneval when we left for Salvador de Bahia) afforded us our only view to the slums of Rio de Janeiro. Otherwise, we stayed away from them, being neither suicidal nor masochistically inclined. From what I could see, they reminded me more of Israel (the way the poorer Palistinians live) than of India; the tiny, crammed, mostly unfinished houses, build ant-nest like one over the over are made of (unpainted) brick, not of metal. Also, in India you find the poor right next door to the rich; not so in Brazil – Brasil? (I’ve seen both spellings) – where they are kept far apart.
The famous Copacabana, obviously, is an area for the rich. Basically, you could all it a beach promenade. All the beaches in Brazil are justly famous. Imagine this beach, and the wide street next to ist, tourists and Brasilians intermingling, most in shorts and/or, if they’re female, in bikinis. The entire country must have declared war on the bathing suite; I certainly was the only woman I saw wearing one. When I say “bikini”, add mentally “at least two sizes too small for the breasts if it isn’t a tourist”, and you get the picture. Also, the slips aren’t nicknamed “teeth silk” for nothing. Now the glorious and charming thing about this is that the Brasilians aren’t a nation of models with top figures. No, there are stout ones, lean ones, old ones, middle-aged ones, downright fat ones, plumb kids, scrawny kids – and they all walk around, feeling entirely easy in their own bodies. Since it was carneval time, you met a small group of dancers every now and then, and the people around joined and danced to the samba rhythm.
Other noteworthy features of this beach promenade: the massages. In Italy, you find shoeshine services offered; here, there were masseurs offering half an hour or an hour of a massage right then and there. Also, about every two hundred meters, there was a quick shower dispenser, not so much to clean yourself but to get refreshed. The heat and the humidity was enormous. No hawkers and no beggars after the wealthy, which was a remarkable contrast to India and other cities with millions of people in them. Sand sculptures, from the traditional sand castle to nudes. They were only there for about two days; on the third, I saw them destroyed, renewed, and formed into something else.
Now, originally the only official carneval event we had tickets for was the Sambadrome on Sunday evening. As spectators, naturally. Having arrived on Saturday morning, we collected our tickets and got into a chat with the guy who delivered them. The fateful question “if this was your first and probably only time in Rio, what would you do, and what is still possible” was asked.
This resulted in the following: tickets for the ball at the Copacabana Palace Hotel that same (Saturday) evening, the permission to walk in one of the parades at the Sambadrome on Monday night. And a mad dash to get costumes. You see, we hadn’t brought any. The costumes for the parade weren’t for us to choose – the Samba schools who offer this chance for visitors give them their spare costumes for whichever part the procession they can be fit in – but the ball, the most famous of the country, no less, had a certain theme: Africa. Which is fine if you’re a bronzed goddess anyway, but here we were, two pale Germans fresh from our snowy home. Thanks to the boutique of the Copacabana Palace Hotel (which incidentally is the oldest of the block – think white colonial Villa where governors or drug lords could reside, or both, and certainly plenty of movie stars), we ended up which something vaguely African. Sort of. My dress consisted of leopard-patterned silk and was cut like a Greek chiton, leaving one shoulder bare. Having had visions of the Brazilian crime scene, I had not brought any real jewelry along, safe two things – fake pearls, and the dreamcatcher I had bought in Louisiana when visiting the States two years ago. So I put the dreamcatcher around my neck and wrapped the fake pearl necklace around my left arm. Together with an outrageous feathery headpiece and my sandals this looked well enough that I wasn’t booed when I walked down the red carpet to enter the Copacabana Palace later that night. Which you have to do, with lots of onlookers cheering or whistling, depending on their impression.
They had decorated the Hotel fitting the “Africa” theme with giant paper zebras, lots of palms and drums, and of course many hired performers – drummers, acrobats, you name it, they had it. Most costumes were gorgeous. Leopards were quite in fashion, but some smart people had figured out that technically, Egypt belonged to Africa as well, and had donned the Cleopatra or Tutanchamon look. As I said before, for every long-legged creature with flat abs, there were five Rubens goddesses or weighty chieftains cheerfully flaunting their imperfections. And no age limit. You had people in their 50s, 60s and 70s dancing the Samba with the same enthusiasm – and the same incredible high heels – that the 20-30 age class did. A lot of security folk abounded, mostly due to the presence of Bill Gates and some other prominent people. They either wore smokings or had gone African as well, which allowed me to judge that their bare-breasted appearance spoke well for gymnastics whithin the security force.
Last years famous American guest, we had been told, had been Barbara Bush, though to everyone’s relief this year none of the Bush family decided to grace the carnival with their presence. I tried to imagine any of them on the overcrowded dancing floor with mostly naked people dancing the samba with increasing frenzy, but my brain went on strike there. My other think puzzle of the evening was to figure out how one of the solo dancers, whose costume consisted solely of paint on her breasts and above her vagina and nothing else, and who transpired as everyone else did, kept that paint intact instead of having it dissolve in sweat. Must be some special mixture.
Present in considerable numbers and usually wearing more elaborate costumes were lots and lots of transvestites. That same day, there had been a drag queen competition, and I guessed some of the winners (because the costumes were really gorgeous) showed up at this party. For some reason or the other, each time we took a break to catch some air on the balcony and drink some water we invariably ended up in one of the spots for the drag queens relaxed. I was fascinated to see that they didn’t go for the huge breasts I had seen transvestites flout in Berlin; theirs in Rio were usually small. They had obviously mastered the art of dancing on high heels together with everyone else, and the huge feathery headgears, which pull one’s hair back, emphasized their bone structure and put a note on the androgynous look.
The next day, after sleeping for an hour or two (these holidays were not in any ways connected to slumber, let me tell you that), we went on with the sightseeing. Rio has some spectacular natural landscape, aside from the long, long beaches. Mountains, both with forest and with houses, the famous sugar loaf (though if you ask me, it looks more like a beehive than a sugar loaf), and the huge concrete statue of Jesus overlooking the city, his arms spread white open – in blessing, some say; in helplessness, say others. There are glass and steel skyscrapers as in every modern city. To find the older houses, one has to go to the quarter St. Teresa, which we did, using an ancient streetcar from which people hung rather alarmingly. The houses in St. Teresa don’t contain more than one or two floors, and in their pastel colours – faded pink, blue and yellow – and Iberian colonial style let you imagine what the city must have looked like till the start of the 20th century. The modern city centre has one or two old houses between eight or so modern ones as well, looking as incongruous there as they in New York or Shanghei. It amused me to see the cinemas playing “Lord of the Rings”, the entire trilogy, mind you. And this was before the Oscars. The harbor had one big (literary) attraction for ship fanatics – the “Queen Mary II”, the largest ship of the world these days, more twice the size of the Titanic. I have to confess gigantic ships don’t talk to me. Old wooden ships, yes; I can watch them intensively both in the museum and in the water. But these exercises in gigantism just get a shrug from me. My companion, however, was delighted.
My favourite view of the city: came on Sunday morning, when we went up to the Sugar Loaf. It was a bit cloudy and misty, but every now and then the sun and wind drove the clouds away. Which meant that once you were up there, you felt like discovering Brigadoon, or the lost Atlantis. Fog, and then suddenly green islands – the hills – or houses, or beaches, or the sea, appearing in the mist and dissappearing again. Breathtaking.
On Sunday Night, we went to an exercise of gigantism which did talk to me. The Sambadrome is constructed along the lines of the Circus Maximus, two lengthy parallel lines, only without the connecting curves on both ends. The parades that march through there are really competitions of the most famous dancing schools of the country. Now, consider: each parade contained between 3500 (minimum number requested) and 5000 (maximum number allowed) participants. Each parade, by itself, outshone, in the spectacle of costumes, wagons and dancing anything one sees at home (meaning my country, Germany) during carneval put together. And there are seven parades in one night. You feel like a spectator of a Roman triumph. The air on those tribunes might get worse and worse, and your ears ring with all the drumming, singing and shouting, but you can’t tear yourself away. And this holds true for all kind of spectators. Those in the expensive places, who had roofs over their heads, were as wildly moving along with the rhythm and cheering as those who risked the sky. (And it had briefly rained earlier that evening, but only for half an hour or so.) Each parade was announced by invidiual fireworks, and then needed about 90 minutes to move through the arena. There were solo dancers, on the wagons and between groups, dancers forming small groups, and then the huge armies of dancers just doing the basic samba steps, singing along and forming a contingent. Each Samba school had a theme – “Fantasy”, for example, and it amused me to see lots of Gandalfs dancing along, followed by a group in Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s Creature makeup, followed by delicate winged Victorian elfs who would have driven Tolkien insane. Or “Science”. Cue a wagon constructed around an atomic model, and really underdressed but over-feathered Einsteins. Or “Ancient Rome”. You get the picture.
The next night, we got to experience the other side of this splendour. The Samba School who had agreed to let us tag along was Mucidade, and its theme for the competition was “Education and Traffic”. Now, we got to march in the last group. Which was supposed to present rather imaginative stop signs. I do have a digital picture; once I work out how, I’ll post it. For now, I’ll do my best to describe it: Firstly, you got into your form-fitting jumpsuit of yellow and black stripes. Then, you slipped into your gigantic – and I really mean gigantic – shoulder piece. About three times the size of what a Rugby or American football player wears. On this, you got the equally gigantic and feathered sign PARE, which is Portuguese for STOP. And then you got your head covered with a striped hat that looked like something you hit at bowling.
Oviously, wearing all of this, you don’t fit in a taxi, or for that matter in any other car. So we took the metro, only partly dressed (meaning we still wore the hats and the PARE sign in our hands or under our arms respectively). And then went, like the dutiful Germans we are, to the Sambadrome two hours before our school was scheduled to start their parade, as we had been told to do. Because you know, we are, like, punctual.
There were a lot of other costumed people heading for the same direction in the metro, but we didn’t see people wearing “our” school’s emblem until arriving there; “there” being not the front entrance, obviously, but the backstage area which was on the open street behind the Sambadrome and went on for miles. It was around half past midnight. Watching another school getting ready, which was interesting in itself, we met a nice girl named Tita who was in charge of helping with the organization, and also happened to be fluent in English. We chatted; she explained that their parade, which had been supposed to start at 2:30 am, would not be able to start until 4:30, so after watching some more, we joined her and she took us to the workshop, an abandoned factory. (Classic K’immie territory, thought the Highlander fan in me) There, Mucidade had set up temporary quarters; the soloists got their costumes fitted, and crowd people like us relaxed and hung out while waiting, able to shelve the heavy shoulder pieces.
Going with Tita turned out to have been an inspired idea, because it started to rain. We assumed it would pass, like the other time, after half an hour or so. Fat chance. An hour later, it still rained. And rained. And rained. At around five o’clock, we had no choice but to go out in the rain and rally behind each other, waiting and getting wet. Thank God for Brazilian heat, thought I, even as Tita declared this was the coldest night of her entire life. Incidentally, shoes were part of the costume as well – red cloth shoes – and they had turned wet quicker than anything else.
“Now, remember,” Tita said, “you must laugh and dance the entire time, otherwise we’ll lose points from the jurors. And sing. If you don’t know the words of the song, just sing anything, it will drown in the mass anyway.”
Finally, around 6:30, the sun having risen behind thick clouds with unrelenting rain, the last fireworks announced our parade. We set in motion. My sun-burned shoulder ached. But hey. It was a once in a life time opportunity. And as we started dancing, the wet clothes weren’t that important anymore. I did wonder how many people would still be left watching us, after a night of rain.
As it turned out, the tourists were mostly gone, but the Brasilians? Had actually remained and were greeting the Mucidade troopers with cheers. The rain-sheltered places were packed and there, they were dancing. But even in the rows exposed to rain, there were these people, dancing to the beat of Samba or cheering us on. Well, the least one can do was to beam and dance away.
“Pare!” I shouted. “Vieni!” Which were the only two words of the song I knew, and then I went on “la la di la do la di a la la la” and danced on the wet cement, with the feathers of my shoulder and headgear being soaked through and making me look like a bedraggled mad bird.
And this was only the start of my Brazilian adventure.
