BRAZIL’S famous Carnival kicks into high gear on Sunday as the city prepares to hold sumptuous multimillion-dollar parades amid what is billed as the Greatest Party on Earth.<\/p>\n
A light rain did nothing to dampen the festive spirit on Saturday, serving more as a refreshing cool-down for bodies worked into a sweat as they danced and gyrated at the numerous ‘blocos,’ or street parties.<\/p>\n
The monster of all the blocos, the Bloco Bola Preta, filled the centre of Rio with a motley crowd of up to two million people wearing all manner of garb – or in many cases, little at all.<\/p>\n
‘Everybody is mixing here. There’s no class differences. None. Everybody is here with the same plan, to have fun,’ said one young woman sporting Elton John-style oversized yellow sunglasses and a bouffant Afro wig.<\/p>\n
Throughout the city, nearly 800,000 tourists, Brazilian and foreign, were taking part in the extravaganza alongside most of Rio’s population of six million, turning the place into a bohemian sprawl buoyed by high-decibel samba music.<\/p>\n
Although the focus was on Rio, which holds key parades on Sunday and Monday, the whole nation was letting loose for Carnival. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BRAZIL’S famous Carnival kicks into high gear on Sunday as the city prepares to hold sumptuous multimillion-dollar parades amid what is billed as the Greatest Party on Earth. A light rain did nothing to dampen the festive spirit on Saturday, serving more as a refreshing cool-down for bodies worked into a sweat as they danced […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=288"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":290,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288\/revisions\/290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}