Carnaval Brasileiro, 4: Desfile (parade)

Here is my sketchbook ("field book", as my aunt liked to call it) entry for the Carnaval parade, translated from Portuguese to English:

WOW!!!!!!!
Now, this is a party!
From the moment I got to my aunt's mom's apartment, I couldn't sit still, and kept wondering when we would leave to go line up with the school. Beija-Flor was going last, since it won the parade the year before, so we really were not going to leave the apartment for the walk over to the Sambódromo until at least 2. I wanted to leave at 11, get to the concentration zone early to see everyone arriving... ...I wanted to see it all! I also wanted to try a certain cravo escarlate (scarlet clove) drink i had been told about. Apparently it's some mysterious potion that you drink before parading that "lifts your spirits" and gives you the energy to go through with the thing. hmmmm...
To distract us a little, someone told my cousin about a good luck custom (simpatia) to keep it from raining. We were supposed throw soap on a neighbor's roof, one big piece and one small one, while chanting, "Santa Clara, Santa Clara, clareia!"(cue lightning bolts, winds blowing, rushing clouds)... Since it had rained the night before during the parade, and we didn't want it to rain on ours, we decided to oblige by the law of Candomblé. So me, my cousin Tomás, and his friend positioned ourselves to fling chunks of soap at the neighbor's roof; but, since we were in an apartment in a multiple building complex, the best we could do was to try and fling the glycerin blocks from a 9th floor balcony, across the street, and onto the roof of the house on the next block. We missed
with some of the pieces, but missed some of the others; would our voodoo be rewarded?
After these antics and a lot of sitting and waiting, we finally began putting our costumes on. Except we couldn't go down the elevators with everything on. So we rushed downstairs, took the requisite photo shoot, and went off to the Sapucaí.
A highway, and underpass, and a sewage canal later, we found ourselves struggling through a crowd of feathered fun seekers, trying to sneak our way through to our section of the group. I thought our costumes were cumbersome, but some people had no way at all of judging what was behind them or to their sides. There were costumes twice as tall and 4 times as wide as the people inside them, made of heavy gauge cable, feathers, sequins, cardboard, fabrics, and plastic. Heavy shit, too. So the best way to get through this crowd is to maneuver through them sideways, so as not to hit anyone with our massive shoulders. At the end of our pilgrimage, we found the other "shrimp", as one of the destaques on top of the floats so eloquently named us. We should have accounted for the inebriation of the people organizing and participating in this celebration, sonsidering how plastered our wing leader (part of my cousin's family) and some people around us were, and the quantity of beer salesmen weaving between the feathers and armatures. As we heard the explosions of fireworks and looked up to see the signal for our school to start its progression, the same woman who had affectionately called us shrimp screams at us: "Hey shrimp, shrimp! You need to run, your wing is way up there!" Turns out our wing director had no idea what was going on, and was too busy staring at breasts and laughing it up with friends (those are some of the main purposes of Carnaval, after all); so half of the wing was where it needed to be and we, the other half, were stuck about 6 or 7 wings back. All of us started running like mad, weaving our way to the side of the now organized school, and sprinting along the sewage canal (mangue) as residents of the area cheered us on from the other bank. We got to our proper place in line a few seconds before the procession made its turn towards the parade grounds. As we turned towards the avenue, we were still bunched up, disorganized, and trying to jockey for position. In the midst of all of this, the three of us muscled our way to the front of the wing, perfect position to get on TV (yes, sometimes I care about TV ;) )! Once we made that turn, when we finally saw the crowd, and the speakers blasted our song directly on top of us, it finally hit me: I aqm about to parade down the Sambódromo with the champion school, and all of these people are here to party along with us! The endorphins started flowing, and i felt an ecstasy of a different kind than i'd felt before. Instead of the anticipation going away and allowing me to relax, and instead of getting nervous about fucking the whole parade up, the adrenaline progressively rose, and I got more and more lost in the moment! I began to feel just the music, and the crowd, and all of a sudden I remembered every single word of the forsaken song I had taken such a long time trying to memorize. I don't think I actually danced samba proper most of the time, especially with ushers constantly getting us into proper position, making us start and stop, etc. But I was definitely dancing to the music, cheering the crowd on, getting them excited, along with the 4,000 other people in the parade. It was that same connection as I felt in the blocos, but much more intense, almost overwhelming. Sure I had a bit less control over how I felt, but it made for an experience, an emotion, I will never forget! And maybe never be able to duplicate. Permanent smiles don't happen often, especially accompanied by dumb fits of laughter and jumping...
The TV cameras even got quite close to my cousin and I, a camera crew began filming a girl (who thought she was all that) samba'ing next to us, and I tried to push my cousin into the frame and throw myself in at the same time. The crew, obviously experienced at this, immediately turned the camera off and went on to the next wing. Blasts!
At the end of the procession grounds, one of the floats broke down, creating a tremendous bottleneck of people in 12 ft. tall and 6 ft. wide metal armatures... ...very entertaining!
Unfortunately I couldn't get my camera out in time. The space between float and fence was about 10 feet, at the most. Needless to say, some of the camaraderie began to dissipate at this point. The three of us were supposed to wait around the dissipation area for my cousin's aunt, but the others got carried away by the waves of people, while I quickly took my shoulders off and pressed myself against the fence. At the end of it all, we found ourselves waiting by the port-a-potties with one completely destroyed costume (my cousin's), to see if we would run into the "chaperones". After a while I decided we should make our way home. But because we were at the other end of the Sambódromo, it would take a while longer. Considering it was already 5:30 a.m., or even later, we thought it was worth it. Surely the adults didn't need our help getting back. After walking back the distance of the parade grounds, we tried to cut across to get to where we needed to go. Not only had they not let us turn to the correct side of the parade grounds, but the police barred any way back to the side we came from. So we followed a new procession of people; parade participants, locals, spectators, in a mass early morning exodus towards transportation. A couple of hours later, we arrived at the apartment, where I disassembled my costume to take it home. At around 10 am, i went off to my grandmother's, more energized and satisfied than I had been the night before.