Last night, CIEE took us to one of Rio’s most famous samba schools. When I first heard the term samba school I thought that it was a community school that taught others sambas but they’re much more than that. The samba schools are the groups that perform at Carnaval, Rio’s biggest celebration. We’ve been getting lectured left and right about Carnaval and yesterday we finally got to see one of the schools.

The samba school we visited is called Estacao Primeira de Mangueira. The picture above is the school during Carnaval. I found this blog with a ton of Carnaval pictures which are beautiful so you should check them out if you can. We went to this giant what I think was a warehouse in the neighborhood of Mangueira. There is a favela right next to it and I believe most of the people in the samba school live in…