Carnaval 2006!!

Ipanema - the mass of people was unbelievable
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Rio Carnival at last! We, I think walked away with mixed feelings. On the one hand it was really exciting and pretty wild to have finally made it to Rio - a city consistently rated as the best party place and on the other hand the carnival was quite different from anything we had imagined. Don´t get me wrong I loved every moment spent there. The Rio carnival essentially consists of two parts - the samba schools parade and the street scene (we had no clue previously). The samba parade takes place in the sambadrome which has assigned seating and is kind of a long stadium. Tickets are required for entry and aren't´t cheap. The best seats can cost you $500 and more. We learned of an option which if you came late, after midnight, you could get half priced tickets from scalpers. We got there at like 2am and got into the sambadrome for $5 each!!! We saw (with a bit of imagination) one and a half schools go by. Each school takes about 50-60minutes and there are 7 schools on Sunday and Monday, the high points of the Carnival. I believe we got to see one of the better ones, Vila Isabel. The Sunday procession is the one that the media usually shares with us. There can be up to 5,000 participants in each school.  The costumes and carnival cars are mind blowing i=with obviously a tonne of work going into them.  We didn't~t take our camera with us as the crime rate is especially high and so the only possessions we had was enough cash to get us back home. One of our friends risked her camera as she felt she had nothing to lose so I am hoping we can get some of those pictures eventually.

Rio city
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We managed to get to the Ipanema street band party. It is one of the more famous. Once again no camera. The streets were barely passable and if you were in a crowd you just had to be prepared to stay there for a while as it would take 30 minutes just to get out to a passable area. There were A LOT of guys dresses in female costumes and a lot of loving on the streets. It was pretty wild!!!

We certainly visited world famous Ipanema and Copacabana beaches. No girls from Ipanema though lost of boys there (it´s a heavily gay communities). The women of Brazil I have found to come short of the beautiful image portrayed across the world. They are beautiful in that they express confidence in themselves regardless of body shape - I found that very refreshing. There were a lot of women that by any other standards would be ridiculed for strutting on the beach with biking thongs but not here!! The guys were an an ´eyeful´, lots of good shapes there. So ladies if you are looking for that hot Latin guy head to Brazil!

A huge cemetary seen from Corcovado
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Well to wrap up, Rio goes on my list of cities highly recommended!!!