A few weeks ago we got the chance to go to Brazil to celebrate two of our best friends’ wedding. Despite Dave and I both getting the flu (and therefore spending a little more time inside our hotel than we expected) we had a great time exploring Rio and a beach town called Buzios nearby.
My two favorite things about Brazil were its culture of celebration and it’s very active feel.
We arrived in Rio at the tail end of Carnaval, but were incredibly lucky to get to go to the final night of parade and celebration. It was an all-night celebration with 8 continuous hours of samba schools parading down a long runway packed with people dancing and partying on either side. The final night is called the “Parade of Champions” and is a culmination of the week’s events, with the 5th runner up starting the night’s parades, and the winner finishing up the parades around 6 am. Each of the floats themselves were absolutely incredible - huge structures often with people dancing on the floats themselves, complete with animatronics and impressive design prowess. More interesting to me, though, was that each samba school (who each had 80 minutes to make it all the way down the parade line) had a theme to their overall presentation. Across 6-8 floats and many sets of dancers, the samba schools told a larger story about the world or the cultural history of Brazil, for example a reflection on climate change and how it’s affecting Brazil, or the heritage of African culture in Brazilian culture. Most of all, across Carnaval and the rest of our time in Brazil, there is a palpable celebratory culture. Samba music floats out of stores and buildings, drumming street groups gather small crowds (this I imagine might be specific to the Carnaval time), and you often see people on the street or beach relaxing and celebrating life.
The other thing I really appreciated was how active the culture felt in Rio specifically. So much of the city seems to revolve around life at the beach, with running and biking paths hopping in the mornings, beach tennis being played with friends, and little to no space to lay down a towel on a sunny weekend day. We also got to witness footvolley, which seems to have the same rules and net height as volleyball, but instead of playing with your hands, you play only with your feet. It’s very impressive to watch.
Sometimes it feels like the trends in the US go from reasonable to somewhat excessive quite quickly — there seems to be a fully productized version of every possible party you could ever want to throw (a dog birthday party, a baby “sprinkle,” a kindergarten graduation). The wellness trends can seem even more ridiculous — I was recently advertised “whole body deodorant” and learned that this is apparently a new product category with many brands developing products. On the one hand, sure, but on the other hand, whole body deodorant?! Come on. Often these things feel odd to me because they don’t feel like the authentic version of the expression. They feel like consumer-ized, productized expressions of pure capitalism rather than the feeling that spurred the idea to begin with. As such, I love to be reminded of what the more authentic version of those concepts can look and feel like. In the case of Brazil, it was people truly enjoying a celebration or the afternoon sunshine with friends, with no pretense or TikTok filter in the way.