Exactly 189 days later, I am back to Rio, that I had left at the end of the Olympics. I went straight back to the Discovery, the hostel of my friend Enrique.Since then, Enrique opened the Explorer bar, on the hills of Santa Teresa. 6 months earlier, I was helping with the painting of this awesome cocktail place.Cocktails have dedicated glass shapes and different geographical origins, as shown on the map above.This is where I managed to do a bit of work, after the Carnaval:The Carnival, here we are! The largest party on Earth, gathering about 2 million people in the streets every day! It’s a massive mess!The Carnival is organised with concerts and blocos. More or less official, blocos are  bands playing and moving slowly down the streets, everywhere in the city, at any time of the day or the night. Dressed-up people follow the movement dancing and drinking. Some blocos are small and are usually the best… some are huge: hundreds of musicians, tens of thousands participants.

Apparently, 200,000 people went to this morning concert:With Enrique, Clemence et Oceane:There is always a flag of Brittany somewhere:Other pictures of blocos:At least it’s clear:The other part of the Carnival is the School Parade I went to with people from the hostel:The show starts at 10pm and ends at 5 or 6am. We left around 2.30am. I was impressed by the size of everything. The stadium, called Sambadrome, is 700m long and 90,000 people watch the competition. I am not going to explain everything, Wikipedia does it well: Each samba school has a preset amount of time (75 minutes) to parade from one end of the Sambadrome to the other with all its thousands of dancers, its drum section, and a number of floats. Each school has its own unique qualities according to its own traditions. Schools are graded by a jury, and the competition is ferocious. And all in samba music!

This is the only event I had to pay for. About 30usd. I was very impressed by the effort put in years after years into the cars, the costumes, the dances…The Carnival lasts for a week, more or less. Kind of week during which you don’t need a brain. I am glad I did it, but I would not go back to Rio especially for it.