Samba Carnaval - Survived it!

It was a fantastic carnival day in Helsinki on Saturday! The temperature went above +25 C and no clouds on sight - hot!! All the dancers were dripping sweat straight from the start and my black makeup was running as if I'd been crying. The sound system of our crew broke down already before the half point of the parade (also before the judges..) and we had to sing with out the melody, luckily we could at least hear the drumming of the bateria clearly. Was a bit rough to dance and sing as loud as you can for about an hour in that heat... but we did it for sure, with a big smile on our face with the help of thousands and thousands of people cheering us :)

Our 'Sanaleikki' group really had team spirit and I'm sure the whole Papagaio samba school impressed the judges with the costumes and the performance! The winner of the Finnish samba championship will be announced on Wednesday (as in Rio after the carnival). The five competing samba schools were 1) Império do Papagaio, theme "Wonderland of child's play" (Helsinki) -- 2) Samba Maracanã, theme "The most beautiful diamond" (Lahti) -- 3) Samba Tropical, theme "The four seasons" (Seinäjoki) -- 4) União da Roseira, theme "Renaissance" (Tampere) and -- 5) Samba el Gambo, theme "Hearts full of the magic of Christmas" (Kokkola). In addition to the samba schools there were also jugglers, capoeira group, folk dancing group, some Brazilian bands and people from the Brazil-Finland organisation.

Here are some ~50 pictures from the carnival taken my friends.
-- A heartfelt thanks to all of my friends and family who cheered me along the road!

Here is one comprehensive set of beautiful carnival pics by Mika Sipura - also with one pretty nice shot of me - the sweaty sambista!

And: A video broadcast of the entire(?) carnival! Spot one familiar blond girl at around 18:15-18:30 :D