Carnival in Rio
Carnival in Rio has been called the world's most famous party. A million tourists join millions of Rio de Janeiro citizens ("cariocas") in enthusiastic revelry spanning several days.
The highlight is the Sambodromo parade. Close runners-up are the street processions and masquerade balls.
Sambodromo parade
The Sambodromo is a 700-meter (half-mile) long parade strip flanked by spectator stands and luxury boxes. On the last Sunday and Monday nights before Lent, the seats are filled with over 60,000 eager on-lookers. Tickets cost up to hundreds of dollars each and sell out quickly.
The attraction is the sounds and sights of the parading samba schools that goes on from dusk to day break.
A samba school has nothing to do with education. It is typically a group from a poor neighborhood organized to produce a lavish Carnival procession - for the fun of it.
Only the best 14 samba schools parade through the big-time Sambodromo (the rest conduct street processions). The competition to be judged the best overall samba school is keen - and everyone wants to win.
It can take over an hour for a single samba school to pass a given point along the parade route. Each samba school has showy floats, which are often garnished with sensuous females vibrating to the hypnotic music.
The floats are accompanied by marching samba bands numbering up to 300 musicians - their drummers ceaselessly pound the contagious samba beat. All is surrounded by a sea of flamboyantly or scantily clad singer-dancers.
These diverse parade elements must work as a single unit, dramatizing the same theme, which the samba school changes annually.
A school can have up to 4,000 participants, so melding the ensemble into an organic whole is no easy task. The preparation requires nearly a year of sewing, building, composing, choreographing and rehearsing.
Samba school participants pay for their own costumes, which costs some of them a sizable slice of their income. They willingly do this because Carnival is a fantasy escape, which helps them forget their hardscrabble lives.
