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2/19/04: Em fevereiro tem carnaval

Carnaval starts Saturday and everyone in Brazil will be somewhere between either cavorting naked in the streets or at home with an American movie, depending on who you talk to. It's hard to gauge its importance, although compared to Mardis Gras in New Orleans, which I was reminded of in a recent viewing of Easy Rider, I wonder what the latter's big deal is.

A friend laughed when I asked her if Carnaval is more important than Xmas - "Of course not, Carnaval is just everyone getting drunk for a week and a lot of slutty dancing." Sounds fun to me, but I can see how she's annoyed by the stereotype. Another friend, when asked the same, said "Of course it's more important - it last five nights." Being somewhat the workaholic American who'd never previously had a job that gave days off between Xmas and New Year's, an entire country shutting down for a week is an impressive enough justification.

And of course there's a myriad of ways to celebrate - stay home, go to the beaches, go out to clubs, go to the sambadromes in the various big cities, take an elaborate vacation. The really big celebrations in Rio and Salvador are getting really commercialized with prices jacked up insanely even if you're paying in dollars, but there's so many other amazing little street parties too.

Me, tomorrow morning I leave for Ouro Preto, a small-ish town in Minas Gerais which is going to be an 11-hour bus ride to the east of S?o Paulo. This little city of 50,000 blows up to 500,000 for the Carnaval, or so I'm told. I've no idea how much I'll be swept up in the whole bacchanal, that'll all be improvised. But the city is supposed to be a really well-preserved version of its circa-1700s legacy, and the story of its Igreja de Santa Efig?nia, built by slaves and a decorated with the gold dust washed from their hair, is terribly beautiful.

And with that, I'm leaving Beatcorpo.net for the week. I'll return next Wednesday [or so] with some pictures and stories on how the whole crazy thing went down.

posted by jeremy @ 4:00 AM