Just 379 days to go!

Immediately after the great Unidos da Tijuca victory on Ash Wednesday, the great heat wave broke. The scalding sunny sky disappeared, the clouds closed in, the rain thundered down. I woke in the night with an extremely strange sensation... I was COLD. Actually, I was being rained on! A frigid wind was blowing icy raindrops all over me. I had to go close the window and even had to get one of those, what are they called, those covery-up things, a "blanket"! It was the most delicious sensation.. shivering, curling up under the blanket. Nothing makes you enjoy cold like three consecutive weeks of 100+ temperatures.

However, I woke up the next day sick, with a sore throat, splitting headache, nausea and absolute thundering exhaustion...the inevitable outcome of five days in a row of staying up all night (followed only by feverish quick naps from 8am to about 11am, when it got too hot to sleep anymore). My first thought was: wait a minute, this isn't fair - if I'm going to have hangover symptoms like this, I ought at least to have gotten to drink something the night before! But no, I was genuinely sick. Stayed in bed sleeping all day, woke up at 5pm and tottered out for some groceries. Slept most of today too... it seems like the whole city, not just me, the whole sky too, is in a kind of depression after Carnaval. Everything seems eerily sad and gray and quiet. A lot of the Lapa clubs are closed. (Actually we've still got a fun weekend coming up, the post-Carnaval weekend with the huge Monobloco parade. But the escola rehearsals are all done... sad...)

Then today I was poking around one of the samba websites and noticed a tiny counter in the upper right hand corner that read:
"379 dias para Carnaval 2011"

And simultaneously the page refreshed to reveal a new news item that Salgueiro has just announced its theme for the 2011 Carnaval (their theme will be Italy). And so it begins again...The great cycle of life, or the cycle of Carnaval, anyway. Nothing ever really ends. It's never really over. There's always another Carnaval to look forward to.