For 3 days every year the far west of Germany goes completely mental, dresses up in costumes, has parades through the streets and consumes stupid amounts of chocolates and lollies. All in the name of Carnival. I have no idea what Carnival is for, something religious I think as it all finishes on Ash Wednesday which is the start of Lent and then your supposed to have no fun for 40 days until Easter, or something like that, you don’t have to understand it to enjoy the party.
The centre of the Carnival universe is Cologne where they even get a public holiday for their parade on the Monday, and any idiot stupid enough to wear a tie on this day can find themselves faced with marauding weirdos brandishing pairs of scissors with which they will then cut your tie in half. Now Cologne may be the centre of the universe but Berlin actually hosts the parade which while not being the coolest, attracts the largest number of spectactors, 700,000!
This was the first year Ela and I had celebrated Carnival as in Hanover it is a complete non event and last year we didn’t know that Berlin was such a big Carnival city. We began celebrations by going to a Carnival party on the Sat night at a friend of Ela’s. You must get dressed up and we were a bit short of imagination so decided that we would go as the undead (See picture of me with a friend of Ela’s below) Nearly everyone got dressed up and despite being held in the smallest apartment on planet Earth and getting trapped by the window in the kitchen with all the smokers we had a good time. To understand the horror of being trapped by a window you had to open once every 30 minutes for about 10 minutes to clear the stale air out check out the temperature gauge picture below. That picture was taken at 9.30pm on the way to the party, by 12.00 you could add a few extra degrees on to that, and yes, that is right what you are seeing is MINUS!!!
Somehow we managed to avoid getting the flu – which has afflicted nearly every person I know but fortunately not us so far – so we were up bright an early the next day to go the parade. One weird thing about Carnival (one of many really) is the parade kicks off traditionally at 11.11am, fortunately organisers in Berlin realise Berlin is a party place and gave us an extra ours grace and kicked off festivities at 12.11!! Again it is a dress up affair, which was all to much for me and I only donned a red nose, Ela went the whole hog of course and dressed up a clown – lets face it she has the hair! (Check out the photo below)
The parade is a huge laugh. Basically loads of floats cruise down the street with music blaring and interspersed with marching bands, your typical street parade fare. What makes it more interesting is that each float throws truck loads of sweets and chocolates out into the crowd. Now this results in every adult in attendance turning into a 5 year old and madly scrambling on the ground to collect as many lollies as possible. Picture this, people throw lollies into the air – smart people bring umbrellas, turn them upside down, hold them up in the air and catch shitloads of lollies, regular joes like us, curse at them, swear we must remember to do that next year, and them scramble to catch what we can, this inevitably leads to us crawling about on the ground basically trying to collect what is essentially 1cent lollies – sad and pathetic when you think about, and we did often but somehow you just can’t stop yourself, even when you already have half a shopping bag full of sweets that will take you 2 months to eat, you just keep going!! We were there for about 4 hours in the end, watched every float go past and then scooted around the parade route to end up back at the front and start all over again, at this point I had to subdue Ela a bit as she wanted to continue on and try and fill the bag but I had lost all feeling in my feet and hands, you must remember, yeah it was a beautiful sunny day but the temperature was probably o degrees and after 4 hours I’d had enough. Great stuff, can’t wait for next year.
