Viva Colonia!

I've never seen so many people drinking outside of a church! I was truly shocked. This was taken at the Karneval parade we went to Thursday morning. This is one crazy festival. The streets were flooded with people, young and old, in ridiculous costumes; most of whom were drinking. Coolest costume I saw that day: Spiderman, no doubt. He had the full spandex suit with the mask and everything. Some people looked really impressive. There were some Ninja Turtles, and plenty of Mario Bros. that looked cool too. Karneval reminds me of a hybrid of Mardi Gras and Halloween. The reasoning for celebrating is because the Catholic religion is about to enter the season of Lent, when one usually gives up a bad habit and tries to reflect and be spiritually and physically healthy. So everyone parties and does a little bit of sinning before this cleansing period. However, not unlike Mardi Gras, not everyone who celebrates is Catholic. The costumes are similar to Halloween, but I'm not sure how that tradition started. Also, the people in the parade throw candy at the audience. So free candy kind of makes it similar to Halloween as well. We took part in all the festivities that day. Thursday of Karneval is when the ladies take over the city. So any man wearing a tie will have it cut off - all the guys in our group were given ties for this reason. We also did a bit of drinking ourselves. I personally thought it was very entertaining to see Dr. Wasser dressed as a monk yelling "Prost!" and clinging beers with me dressed as a cowboy. Truly, a once in a lifetime opportunity. We ended up going to Cologne to celebrate. It really dawned on me how hard it is to make it through an entire day of drinking. I couldn't do it. Albeit, I didn't necessarily eat much that day. This was the source of all my problems that day. I got in a fight with Captain Morgan and lost pretty bad. I have the black eye to prove it. Not the proudest moment in my life, being "that guy" on Karneval. But nonetheless, I'm loving every moment of this German experience.

This weekend a group of us are going to Dusseldorf. I'm not exactly sure what we'll be doing, but I know we're making a trip to the longest bar in the world: Dusseldorf's Altstadt. They also celebrate Karneval in Dusseldorf, however the Cologners aren't too fond of the people there. It'll be nice to compare and deduce a conclusion of my own.

Until next time...