Krank Karneval

Before writing my own blog post on Karneval, I was reading through other blog posts for inspiration and I've got to say, I had quite a different experience from most other people:/.  On Thursday (the first official day of Karneval), we walked across the Rhein River to the neighboring town of Beuel with the entire AIB student body to watch the parade. That morning, I had Corey die my hair pink to complete my hippie Kostume - remind me to get someone else to do it next time, because I'm pretty sure this man put enough hair dye in my hair to paint a house. It took a good 2 hours to dry. Anyways, the parade gave us a fun introduction to Karneval, the Cologne/Bonn equivalent of Mardi Gras on steroids. Probably the saddest part of the entire ordeal was the fact that I was almost completely sober, while a group of 70+ year old grandmas in front of me were chugging vodka (at 10 in the morning) and living it up like its 1955. After yelling for "Kamella" (candy) and drinking warm Kolsch (cause all the cold beer was out of stock in the nearby Aldi), we followed the parade to the Beuel Rathaus and joined in the after party. The rest of the day, we walked around the town, joining in the various Karneval celebrations wherever we found one. After a while, we stopped to get a cheap lunch at McDonalds, but I wanted to leave almost immediately once a random drunk german guy started whispering  "You want a French fry?" and making weird noises in my ear. That night, after suffering through 75 minutes of listening to our differential equations teacher rant about quotes and quantum physics (yes, we still had our math class during the holiday 😐) we returned to the town to experience the Karneval nightlife.  After taking one swig of the nastiest Apple rum I have ever tasted, however, I immediately knew something wasn't right. Within about 20 seconds, my entire Spaghetti dinner ended up in the middle of the town square. Despite this, I stayed out for a couple more hours, jumping up and down to traditional German Karneval music with a bunch of old men and women over the age of 50, but I felt progressively worse through-out the night. The next morning, I woke up extremely nauseous with a pounding headache, and I spent the next day and half keeled over a toilet. All I've got to say about the next couple of days is, don't catch the flu guys- it's not fun. Saturday afternoon, I felt good enough to get out of bed and go on a small hike in the neighboring hills (Siebengeberge, "Seven Hills"), but I continued to feel sick the entire duration of Karneval weekend.