Brazil, Thailand and Spain - strange & interesting events
Rio Carnival
Everyone has heard of the Rio Carnival - it's the benchmark against which every other carnival is compared. A spirit and energy takes over the city and has everyone enraptured for four days of infectious rhythmic shuffling and unbeatable revelry.
Rio Carnival is the result of months of preparation. Foreign visitors alone number around 300,000 every year, and the parading samba schools are continuous streams of colour, motion and rhythm. Some have members running into thousands, with as many as 30 floats each and hundreds of drummers. The synchronised steps, swirls and rhythms are faultless.
Every samba school strives to win the favour of the crowds and whip the onlookers into a frenzy of singing and dancing. Judges at strategic points along the carnival route grade the contestants on everything from enthusiasm, discipline and costume to rhythm and dance.
Rio alone will have 900 000 visitors! Plus there are plenty smaller carnivals throughout!
Trang Underwater Wedding Ceremony
Couples from Thailand and around the world stage a special wedding ceremony underwater off Pak Meng Beach in the Trang district in Southern Thailand. Don't worry if you're not a qualified diver, non-diver couples can also say their vows here too.
The ceremony keeps to the traditional Thai wedding culture. The brides and grooms are escorted to their honeymoon suites by older, happily married couples in the hope that some of what they have will rub off on the newlyweds... The bridal couples also get to wear traditional hand-woven Thai wedding costumes.
Pero Palo
The ritual celebration of Pero Palo in Villanueva de La Vera is an incredible spectacle of genuine Spanish culture. Every year the townspeople parade the straw figure of Pero Palo, dressed from head to toe in black, around town.
The men of the town dance around the figure, beating and taunting him, and in no time at all his head is knocked off, there is a drum roll and it is buried. Dancing, feasts and celebrations follow.
There are a few conflicting explanations behind this tradition. Some say that Pero Palo was a bandit who was ruthlessly punished in this way. Another source maintains that the tradition comes from 16th-century Spanish theatre, designed to show the fate of those found guilty by the Inquisition.
