🇧🇷 Brazil vs 🇬🇧 UK | By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office
Let us talk about what a country does when it has been officially given a day off. This is, in many ways, the most honest test of national character available. Remove the obligation of work, hand the population free time, and observe. Brazil, given free time, builds an elaborate costume, joins a bloco, consumes something made of rum and passion fruit, and dances at a volume that registers on seismographs in neighbouring countries. The UK, given free time, goes to a garden centre that is not open, finds another garden centre that is, buys a bag of compost it didn't need, and considers the whole enterprise a moderate success.
I have experienced Carnival in Salvador, which is not the Rio Carnival you've seen in photographs but is, by some measures, the largest street party on the planet — three million people, eleven days, sound trucks (trios elétricos) the size of small apartment buildings, and a physical joy so comprehensive it felt like an argument against all forms of organised pessimism. I have also experienced a UK bank holiday Monday in Guildford, which involved rain, a pub that was inexplicably out of chips, and a collective national mood that could generously be described as "stoic acceptance of leisure." Both are real. One of them is something I would recommend.
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Book accommodation months in advance for any city hosting major Carnival — Rio, Salvador, Olinda, Recife fill up entirely; last-minute travellers are not accommodated, they are punished | Assume all of Brazil celebrates the same Carnival; each region has its own traditions and the regional variations are worth researching before you accidentally end up at a different type of festival than intended |
| Wear comfortable shoes, carry minimal valuables, and use a money belt or hidden pouch during street festivals — crowds are enormous and opportunistic theft is common | Try to drive or use a private car during major festival periods in large cities; road closures, blocked streets, and the sheer volume of people make this impractical to the point of absurdity |
| Attend at least one bloco street party even if the main Carnival events are sold out — many blocos are free, chaotic, and more authentically local than the ticketed grandstand events | Underestimate the heat; Brazil's festival calendar clusters in January to March, which is summer in the southern hemisphere and requires hydration planning |
| Join in — Brazilian festival culture is explicitly inclusive and strangers are welcomed into groups, street dancing, and communal celebrations with warmth that is genuine rather than performative | Leave hotel security behind your valuables lightly; even medium-value items left in bags during crowded street festivals attract attention |
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Make plans in advance for bank holidays — good restaurants book up, popular countryside spots fill their car parks by 9am, and improvised bank holiday Mondays frequently end in a mediocre pub lunch | Assume shops, banks, or services are open on bank holidays without checking; the UK retail sector has inconsistent bank holiday policies and regional variation is significant |
| Visit the summer festivals (Glastonbury, Edinburgh Fringe, Notting Hill Carnival) — the UK does large outdoor events exceptionally well when it has had time to prepare | Conflate Scotland, Wales, and England's bank holiday calendars; they differ in ways that will catch you out if you assume a UK public holiday is universal across the nations |
| Use bank holidays for domestic travel — the UK's national parks, coastal paths, and heritage sites are genuinely excellent and bank holidays are a reasonable prompt to use them | Plan outdoor activities without a backup plan for rain; May and August bank holidays in particular have a documented relationship with catastrophic weather |
| Accept that the bank holiday pub will be fuller than you want; arrive early or accept a standing arrangement | Expect the spontaneous street festival atmosphere of warmer countries; the UK's impromptu bank holiday street life is pleasant but tends toward orderly garden openings and village fetes |
Brazilian festival culture is not a side feature of national life — it is structural. The country has twelve national public holidays, several of which are religious, but the centrepiece of the cultural calendar is Carnival, a pre-Lenten celebration that has evolved over four centuries into something for which the only honest description is "organised transcendence." The official dates are four days, but in practice, blocos begin in January and the city of Salvador runs a separate eleven-day event that dwarfs the Rio parade in pure participation numbers.
Rio's Carnival, which is what most people picture, is a genuine spectacle: the Sambódromo parades, where the major samba schools compete, involve months of preparation, extraordinary costumes built by design teams working year-round, and floats constructed to engineering specifications. A single samba school can have between 2,000 and 4,000 members in its parade. The music, choreography, and visual design are assessed by judges on twelve criteria. This is not a party that assembled itself.
But it is the street-level Carnival that expats tend to remember longer. The blocos — informal groups that move through neighbourhoods behind sound trucks playing samba, axé, or frevo — are free, chaotic, and require nothing of you except a willingness to move in a direction that is determined largely by the crowd. In Salvador's Campo Grande, the trios elétricos (the massive sound trucks on which the musicians and paid ticket-holders travel) have their own ecosystem of people who follow them through the streets for hours. Non-ticket-holders occupy the open streets alongside; the party is multiple simultaneous parties layered on top of each other.
What strikes first-time expats is the completeness of the shutdown. Brazilian Carnival is not a festival that runs while the city otherwise continues. The city stops. Banks close, offices empty, and even large employers recognise that productivity during Carnival week is a theoretical rather than practical concept. The country has agreed, collectively, that these four days belong to this.
The United Kingdom has eight bank holidays in England and Wales, nine in Scotland, and ten in Northern Ireland — a number that puts it among the lowest bank holiday totals in Europe. The French get eleven, the Austrians get thirteen, and the Brazilians are simply not participating in this kind of quantitative comparison because they have Carnival. The UK's approach to the bank holidays it does have is characterised by a peculiarly British combination of genuine pleasure and mild logistical chaos.
The August bank holiday is the paradigm case. On the last Monday of August, the British population makes a collective decision to go somewhere, without agreeing on where, resulting in motorway queues of the kind that make continental Europeans question whether the English actually enjoy leisure or are simply committed to suffering in new locations. The coastal resorts — Brighton, Cornwall, the Norfolk coast — receive what is essentially the annual tide: an enormous wave of people who want fish and chips, candyfloss, and a walk on a beach that is, statistically, cooler than they had hoped.
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This is not nothing. The British, when given a proper framework, do festivals well. Glastonbury is one of the most well-organised large music festivals in the world — a 200,000-person event that produces surprisingly few incidents. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which runs across the August bank holiday period, is the largest arts festival on earth by number of performances. Notting Hill Carnival, a two-day event in west London that is itself a piece of cultural history — begun in 1966 by Trinidadian immigrants and now the largest street festival in Europe — attracts a million people annually and has a relationship with joy that the UK's festival culture is not otherwise associated with.
The bank holiday pub, finally, deserves acknowledgement. On any bank holiday afternoon, the British pub — which is the nation's real festival venue — becomes something genuinely warm, loud, and social in a way that temporarily resolves the question of whether the British know how to celebrate. They do. They just need a dedicated venue, a reasonable excuse, and someone to tell them it's acceptable to start at noon.
This one is not close. Brazil has invented something — the street carnival, the bloco, the civic commitment to collective joy — that is among the greatest cultural achievements of any society currently operating. The UK's festival calendar is pleasant, occasionally exceptional (Glastonbury, Fringe, Notting Hill), and structurally constrained by weather, a low bank holiday count, and a national character that approaches leisure with the faint suspicion that it might be doing it wrong.
Expats moving from the UK to Brazil report the festival shock going in one direction: nothing has prepared them for the scale, the noise, the heat, or the warmth of a country that treats public celebration as a public good. Expats moving from Brazil to the UK report a festival shock going in the opposite direction: a polite and orderly December switch-on ceremony with complimentary mulled wine is not Carnival.
Both are true. Only one of them is Carnival.
<small>"I went to Carnival in Olinda thinking I'd read enough about it. I had not read enough about it. There is no ceiling on the amount of preparation that would have been adequate. I also had the best four days of my adult life." — Reddit r/brazil</small>
<small>"Bank holiday Mondays in the UK have a specific atmosphere I can only describe as 'determined enjoyment in difficult conditions.' Everyone is trying very hard to have a good time despite the weather, the crowds, and the fact that everywhere good is fully booked. I have come to love this about the British." — Internations London</small>
<small>"The UK Christmas period is genuinely festive and considerably better than I expected. The problem is it lasts about three weeks and then January arrives and is twelve weeks long. Brazil does not have this problem." — expat.com</small>
Festival culture is where a nation's values become audible. Brazil's festivals say: we are here, we are alive, this matters. The UK's festivals say: we have organised this carefully and hope you'll find it pleasant; there are toilets at the far end. One of these is a philosophical statement about human existence. The other has a very good sound system at Glastonbury and excellent tea at the village fete.
If you are choosing where to live on the basis of public holidays alone — which would be a strange criterion but not an irrational one — the data is clear. Brazil has more of them, they are bigger, they are louder, they are warmer, and they come with rum. The UK has Glastonbury, the Edinburgh Fringe, and the quiet triumph of the bank holiday barbecue successfully lit despite the weather.
The rum wins. It was always going to be the rum.
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Suki Nakamura
Staff writer covering financial markets and corporate strategy. Has strong opinions about spreadsheets.