RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Rio de Janeiro’s mayor handed over the important thing to town to its Carnival monarch on Friday, opening King Momo’s five-day reign over the festivities.
“Don’t call me. Call King Momo until Ash Wednesday comes,” Mayor Eduardo Paes, sporting shorts and a Panama hat, instructed Carnival revelers as drummers and veteran members of native samba colleges celebrated and sang conventional songs. “You should come for this guy. He’s going to be in charge of the whole thing.”
Momo’s tenure is symbolic of society being turned the other way up throughout Carnival. His position is impressed by Greek mythology. Momus is the personification of satire, mockery and irreverence.
This 12 months’s Momo is 28-year-old Kaio Mackenzie, from the working-class Mangueira neighborhood. Rio’s Carnival queen and princesses joined him, dancing to samba music as they held town key aloft and confetti poured down upon them.
Some avenue events have already been sweeping by way of Rio’s streets within the lead-up to Carnival, however the five-day celebrations will see virtually city-authorized 500 bashes within the metropolis. There are dozens extra casual events roving about.
On Friday afternoon, considered one of Rio’s most conventional avenue events, Carmelitas, took maintain within the hilltop Santa Teresa neighborhood. It was based in 1990 and plenty of of its revelers come out dressed as nuns and monks of the area’s Carmelites Convent.
Some on the street social gathering paid tributes to Pope Francis, who’s hospitalized in Rome. Earlier, the Vatican mentioned the pontiff had a bronchial spasm and his prognosis stays guarded.
Town’s 12 top-flight samba colleges will current their Carnival parades on the metropolis’s Sambadrome between Sunday and Tuesday.
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