It´s Carnaval!

Hey yall, so before I get to Carnaval, a little update on everything else. Spent the week doing case studies and Wednesday night everyone went to a soccer game (Sao Paulo vs Columbia) although I did not attend. Thursday night was family night at our house and Flavia had over her brother Leonardo and her mom. She made a huge middle eastern meal with falafel, pita, baba ganoush, and loveliness. Friday was evaluation day of the program and then people were ready to get out and do some carnaval!

So me and the others who were in the parade showed up at our meeting point and got our costumes which were RIDICULOUS. Unfortunately, at this point i have no pictures but when other people post them ill put some here. The theme of our samba school was "precious jewels" so for some reason our costumes were gladiators? i dont know. So we put them on and they were huuuge so we could only fit 3 people in each cab to go to the parade. We got there and it was just chaos. Theres people everywhere selling beer and water, chicks wearing barely anything, people in owl, bear, you name it costumes. So we walked forever to get to the place where they line us up (and meanwhile, these costumes were HOT). Then after being interviewed by all these tv stations who just love that americans are there, we had to walk forever to do the line up cuz we were in the first school. But the line up was really long because each school of samba takes one hour to parade through and there are 20 parts to each school...and we were number 7. Lined up and waited forever, then started moving and waited forever at the beginning of it. Schools have to start right on time (and finish at pretty much exactly one hour) because they get points for it and this is a competition. We started walking and singing the song for our school even though we didnt really know the words. WE couldnt even really see either cuz the helmets we were wearing were so heavy and covered our eyes! We were trying to spot the other IHPers in the crowd but turns out their bus took 2 hours getting lost and getting there so they didnt even see us in teh parade! Ergo, I have no pictures or proof that I was in this parade. But..whatevs. At the end of walking we chucked out costuems off (and some of us kinda just chucked em...they were really big and too much to send home) and went to go find our classmates. The rest of the parade we hugn out in the bleachers and just took photos. We actually ended up leaving early at 4 in the morning before all 6 samaba schools had gone. yikes.

dudes were everywhere selling beer

i think this schools theme was the nutcracker or somethin...each school has its own theme but they seem to be loosely interpreted

this is raphael. Hes one of our country coordinators and he tells us about all the cool stuff to do, like concerts, soccer games, hipster bars, etc. he bought this owl for a teacher of his who loves owls.



on each float there are crazy people dancing with only these 2 poles to hang onto. i was kinda hopin someone would fall off one.






this is how many girls in the parade looked....or they were wearing even less clothes. no full on nudity at sao paulo carnaval but definitely saw lots of boobies.