Fasching!

So every year in Germany, around the time of Fat Tuesday, the Deutsche Leute let loose. Between Christmas and then there is practically nothing going on and the people are ready for a big ol' party.

What we (the exchange students) did to celebrate this great event, was to of course find out way to the biggest party in Western Germany. This was in a city called Mainz, maybe you've heard of it, but probably not.

Here is our tale.

Nick and I go up to a city called Alzey on the Saturday preceding the event to meet up with Judit and Baylee (Hungary and Ohio) and spend the night there. On the train there we decide to don our magical costumes (it's Carneval) and to prepare ourselves for the upcoming amazing days. We were bears.



This picture is from the club that we went to that night (Saturday). It was crazy good. Baylee lives in Alzey and she brought all her friends along with us to the club.

The next day on Sunday there was a parade in Alzey. This was kindof a pre-party for what was to come on Rosenmontag (Red Monday).

After we had dorned our battle/bear suits Baylee took us down into the town where the parade was. It was really fast moving and cool. Loud music, dancing, people leaning out of the floats and pouring free champagne and wine. Ah, good times. The parade moved in a winding motion so we kept skipping down blocks to get back to the parade and to see more of it. To say the least, Sunday was awesome. We went to bed early, because we had to get up at the crack of dawn the next day.



We got up at about 7 to get on the train to go to Mainz. It's about 40 minutes away by the slow train. At 7 in the morning it was packed! But the coolest part was that it was packed with people already in costume (Nick and I already had our bear suits on). All the way there we sung Karneval songs.

We de-train and follow the flow into the massively decorated city. The crowd weaves and meanders its way to the parade path which is about 7 km long, winding through the city. We found Baylee's friends, my friends from Neustadt, and Andres (an exchange student from Mexico, not in our district) all totally by chance.

The parade was huge! Marching bands, floats, balloons, free shit, more floats, drum lines, cars, just everything moving down the streets in Mainz. After a while the parade was getting a bit boring for Nick and I, so we decided to be part of it. We strap on our backpacks as tight as we can, and just start running through the thick of it, chanting a long with whoever was yelling something, and giving free bear hugs on the way. It was fantastic! We ran the entire duration of the course yellin' and screaming.

After the parade was over, the street was covered in broken glass, just completely covered. Another funny thing, that every single establishment had a sign outside the door saying how much it was charging for a person to go to the bathroom. The highest that I saw was like 3 euros!!!

As the night came on, parties started appearing right in the street. Crazy, loud, dancing, screaming, cars, street cleaners spraying water at us, more music. FUN

At one party we were at, I started to feel something weird. Something wasn't right here. I just couldn't put my paw (remember I'm a bear) on it. Suddenly it hit me. Where were all the girls? Why were there so many guys at this party, and why did they have their shirts off? Why are those two guys making out? Why is the bar that we are dancing in front of called "Glitter"...

IT WAS A GAY BAR PARTY!

Sooo... we ran, in our bear suits, as fast as we could.

We found our way to the biggest dance of the city, the SWR3 Open Air party. It was amazing! Just totally indescribable.

We got outta there about at 2 o clock and took the train home to Baylee's house. On the way we went to the amazingly open gas station, and got chocolate milk. Never tasted better.

And that is how you spend Fasching in Deutschland.