Doug’s World

Carnival Photos

For everyone who has expressed interest in the parade photos, here they are: a few dozen of our favorites out of the 600+ photos I took during the 9 hours we were at the parade in the Sambodromo.

I don’t have time to arrange these in any sort of artistic fashion, so there are just a few pages, each with a bunch of photos on it. And organizing these into categories is open to lots of debate — is that a picture of a cool costume, a fleshy female, a parade float, a she-male, a cute guy, or all of the above? I just went with my first instinct, mostly because I’m really busy this week and this is the only way I’ll get them up on the web site for everyone to see.

So here are the categories …

Fleshy females. The most-requested category first — Paul and Phil, DON’T LOOK AT THESE! (OK, so that’s probably not going to stop them. Charlie and Nick, you guys should probably take cold showers, too.)

Cute guys, for Guillermo and the girls. Sorry if my definition of “cute” doesn’t match yours!

Parade floats. This is the biggest page, so go make yourself another drink while this one loads. Brazilian engineering at its finest.

Clever costumes. Every act had hundreds of costumes, usually appearing in waves of a few dozen of these, then a few dozen of those, usually with a fleshy female or two in between. Sort of like a palette-cleansing sorbet between courses of a fancy meal.

The fans in the stands. The guy in the white shirt and the girl in tight jeans and a white top (behind the railing) were our favorites. They should have taken a bow at the end of the night.

Interesting facial expressions. Of these, there were many.

Divas. Frankly, that word applies to a pretty high percentage of the women (and “women”) in the parade, but I thought these three should be included and I couldn’t decide where to put them.

She-males. I could be wrong about some of these, of course (sorry about that!), but others seem pretty clear.

Parade organizers. These are the people who help keep the parade moving, running around amongst the dancers and singers and pushing them into line or prodding them along. Their exuberance was fun to watch. I’ve also included here people like the street-sweeper girl who dressed up in various outfits and danced while her colleagues cleaned up after each act. Note her official Sambodromo photo ID card, like all the other employees.

Hey, if you appreciate all the work it took to get this together, feel free to post a comment. (I’m just trying to build as much traffic as Scoble so I can be an A-list blogger.)

Oh yeah, we were there, too.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 27th, 2006 at 10:08 pm. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.