Barriers block
off most of the streets downtown and thousands of people line the street for a
nearly 3-hour long parade. Hundreds of
people wearing matching shirts scramble here and there all over the region. Speakers constantly blare the broadcast of
the local radio station for nearly 48 hours straight. Local stores sell out their entire inventory
of popsicle sticks and thumbtacks. And
the city is still awake and busy throughout the night. It’s Gincana time again!!
After
hearing about it for so many years (at least 7, since we were married anyway), I was very excited to
experience this unfamiliar phenomenon myself first-hand this past weekend. The simplest way I can describe it to you is
that it is a 2-day, city-wide scavenger hunt.
But that description really doesn’t do it justice. So here come the details!
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| "Santa's House" Float |
First,
there are 5 teams that have participated in each Gincana for the past 20+ years
(or one of them may have joined more recently than that, but I don’t
remember). Each team has a minimum of 600
team members, and some have up to 2500. The
event is put on by the radio station in town and sponsored by many local
businesses. It currently takes place
every other year. Most of our family
have been participants with the team Fantasma since the tradition began, and
therefore so are we. One thing I didn’t
fully appreciate before is that while the actual scheduled event is only one
weekend, these teams begin working and preparing many months, even years ahead
of time! Meetings were held at Fantasma
headquarters early this year, discussing a theme for our team’s portion of the
parade, including t-shirt design and team anthem for the year. I knew there would be a parade, but what I
did not know was the level of detail
and how much intensely hard work went into the preparations! Our team’s chosen theme was “Christmas”, and
hundreds of hours of work went into building and decorating floats with
flawless detail, sewing costumes and props, and creating various toys and
rolling carts for “jack-in-the-boxes” to pop in and out. I’d like to say I had a hand in creating some
of the colorful parade items, and we did help with some small parts here and
there. But after a painful incident with
a hot glue gun, and having to chase a toddler around the majority of the time,
our contributions were not as great as those of many others. So, hats off to the many other team members
who worked their tails off and made the Fantasma parade awesome this year!!
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| Not just Christmas Trees, DANCING Christmas trees! |
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| I felt sorry for the poor Gingerbread Men, wearing such thick layers in 80-90 degree weather! |
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| Jack-in-the-Boxes! (The one on the far left with orange and black stripes is the project that I helped with, and resulted in my blistered thumb.) |
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| The occupants of these snowmen probably really did melt a little during the parade! |
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| Our team headquarters, before the tasks were given. The wall of white is where tasks were written and tracked throughout the weekend. |
After the
parade is over, things become intense!
Teams gather at their headquarters listening as the radio announcer reads
off riddle after riddle, task after task for teams to complete. There were close to 100 different tasks this
year, and they were announced sporadically throughout the day and night,
keeping everyone on their toes. Some
involved going out and searching for specific, rare and hard to find
items. (Such as a receipt from a certain
store dated back to when the store first opened around 50 years ago. Who even keeps that kind of thing??) Others were riddles that sounded like
complete nonsense (and not just to me)
for team members to solve and then go to various locations within a certain
given time frame to meet someone else holding a clue or task item. This year, for
one of the tasks, the radio station had previously sent an employee to
Scotland, and he was waiting at the Edinburgh Castle at a certain time. Each team had to send someone (not
necessarily a team member, just someone willing to represent the team) to meet
him during the specified time frame, hold up a sign with a specific message,
and have a picture taken with him. (To my amazement, all 5 teams were able to come
up with connections in Scotland and complete this task.) Then
there were the competition tasks in which team members meeting certain
descriptions were sent to the radio station to compete in some way – juggling,
kicking soccer goals, playing basketball, etc.
Then there were tasks involving performances, which were completed at
the end of the weekend. To be honest, we
kinda skipped watching these so I don’t know much about how they went, but I
know they involved team members dressing up and lip-syncing to various songs on
stage in front of a crowd of several thousand people. When the video comes out, I’ll have to check
them out.
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| It was difficult to find enough of the right color pins to use, so solution? Spray paint them whichever color needed! |
And then, there
were my preferred tasks:
construction tasks. In this Gincana,
we had to use a paper-sculpting art technique (and no, it wasn’t papier mache!)
to recreate a certain piece of art, build a replica of the city’s downtown
cathedral and plaza using only glue and popsicle sticks, create a Brazilian
flag using only colored pins poked into a styrofoam base (ending with no white
visible between pins), build a model of the Eiffel tower (I never caught the
specifications on that one), build a scene described in a certain passage of
scripture in the book of Revelations, create a Mandala of the radio station’s logo (if you know what a Mandala is
without googling it, then you already know more than I did!), and make a huge
Carnaval-style doll/puppet (boneca olinda)
of our team leader for someone to use in a competition.
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| Nope, not done yet! |
So as you
can probably imagine, there was plenty of work to keep our relatively small
team of 200 (or less, as time went on) task-workers busy the entire weekend! Tiago had the … err, privilege? of working in
the computer room, researching tasks with Google and looking online for
anything that would help solve riddles, or pictures to help with construction
tasks. Turns out, working on tasks with
the computer can be extremely frustrating as there isn’t much info to be found… Since my knowledge of where to find anything in this area, much less rare
collector’s items, is rather slim, I was better off trying to help with the
craft projects. So I glued and I glued
and at one point ended up with a popsicle stick glued to my thumb. After wincing and prying it off, there was still
plenty more popsicle stick gluing to keep myself and several other people busy
throughout the night. When we finally
finished, nearly 10,000 sticks later, our hands were practically wearing gloves
made of glue. But it felt good to look
at our work and think, “Hey, WE made that in less than 24 hours!” And I think a standing ovation is in order
for Senhor Paulo (I don’t remember his last name), who was the main architect
of the cathedral. Incredible amount of attention paid to details and making every
single stick fit perfectly!!
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| Still adding grass and walkways to the plaza, but the cathedral was complete with doors and fancy windows. |
By 11 am of
the second day, exhaustion set in. I
hadn’t felt so tired since my all-nighter’s in college. After a nice 5-hour nap, Tiago and I took a
leisurely stroll to the stadium nearby to hear the final scores and winner announced.
And the final results –Fantasma, 2nd place. It was a little disappointing not to be
announced as “Gincana Champions” this time around (how cool would it have been
for us to have won my first Gincana?!),
but I was truly amazed by all of the teamwork and seeing everyone pull together
to accomplish what seemed like the impossible, over and over, within a two-day time period. Some awesome masterpieces were created out of
thin air! And can I just say one more
time how FANTASTIC the Fantasma parade was!!
So, Parabens pra todo mundo da equipe Fantasma!! Thank you for an exciting, crazy, fun weekend
in my first Gincana!!
Note:
For those who are concerned that I kept my child up 36 hours without
sleeping, please know that she enjoyed having an extra-fun weekend at her
grandmother’s house and had a full night’s rest. I’m pretty sure she didn’t
feel picked-on or left out at all. J
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