Fasching

It's Fat Tuesday.  New Orleans has Mardi Gras, Brazil and Venice have Carnaval/Carnevale, and the Rhineland  has Fasching (which is sometimes also called Karneval, or Fastnacht. It's all the same).  While this party is celebrated to some degree everywhere in Germany, the big party really belongs to this region, especially to Cologne and our neighbor across the river, Mainz. 

Things start ramping up to this "Fifth Season" shortly after New Years, when the stores suddenly become full of costumes, colorful decorations, silly hats, and the bakeries start selling Berliner (jelly/cream filled donuts that I previously dissed in my Mainz post. I take it back, after sampling one filled with coconut cream on Saturday. I'm still having dreams about it. These things are awesome!). This is like 5 or 6 days of the wildest Halloween you can imagine.  This is their chance to dress up in costumes, and it's pretty normal to see an adult sized bunny walking down the street on Rosenmontag, or a 6-foot lion in front of you at the grocery store.  Starting on the Thursday before Ash Wednesday, which is known as Weiberfastnacht, the party begins and continues through today (although nothing really seems to be happening today except clean up, and probably tens of thousands of hangovers). 

Besides parties, costumes, fancy balls, and a carnival-like atmosphere everywhere, the main events are the parades, which last for hours.  Wiesbaden had a children's parade on Saturday, which was short and sweet, followed by the big parade on Sunday, which lasted for hours. We lasted for one.

Kid's parade, Wiesbaden



The parades mostly consist of marching bands and floats carrying various people from various clubs who are dressed up in silly costumes and are probably pretty drunk after 5 or 6  hours of parading.  They throw candy, bags of popcorn, and other random trinkets (I scored a stuffed animal for Elsa, which has been rocking her world). There are also many people dressed up as soldiers, which originated as a mockery of the French occupation of Mainz in Napoleonic times (early 1800s). 

The real high point of the weekend is the Rosenmontag parade in Mainz, which is the second largest in all of Germany. Despite warnings, we took our 2 little kids across the river to check it out (I mean,  if you're just across the river from where it's all going down, don't you think you should see it?).  It was NUTS.  We arrived at 4pm, 5 hours after the parade had started, and it was still going strong.

???

80-year-old disco lady- my favorite character of the weekend.

And tomorrow, all the festivities come to a screaching halt as we enter Lent.  Now would be the time to motor on down to Bavaria to partake in their "Fifth Season," Starkbierzeit (strong beer season), which just begins during Lent. This is when the breweries all release their Doppelbock beer, which, as rumor has it, was originally brewed by monks to sustain them during the Lenten fast.  That's probably the kind of fast that most of us could embrace.