Carnival in Cologne

On March 10, 2014May 30, 2020 By StevenIn International Travel - Inside Germany14 Comments

On Rose Monday, I was in Köln for the Rosenmontag (Rose Monday) Parade. This was part of a slightly larger trip which included Karlsruhe and Stuttgart- I’ll talk about those in another post, because Cologne during Carnival is more than enough for one post.

First, a brief administrative note- I took more than 600 pictures, and I whittled them down to around 180 or so that were worth sharing with anyone. From those, I picked 32 for this post. If you want to see the ~150 that aren’t in the post, they’re in this gallery over here.

Second, there are a few things to bear in mind while looking through these pictures:

1) The best thing about the Carnival season for a big kid like myself is the costumes. There were so many costumes- I noticed a high count of bees, giraffes, and pirates. The people who wore full body fur suit costumes had the right idea though. The temperature wasn’t bad, but it was windy. Unless you were standing directly in the sun, it was kind of cold.

2) If I ever go to one of these things again, I totally need a costume with a helmet. Flying bars of solid chocolate hurt when they hit you in the head. Even a packet of Haribo gummi bears can be unpleasant if you get beaned right in the forehead. The candy was being thrown for hours, and after a while I started to shrink back like a kicked puppy any time someone made a throwing motion. The kids standing on either side of me made out like bandits from all the noggin-bounce candy castoffs, though.

3) These pictures actually span two parades. When I arrived in Cologne on Sunday afternoon, there was a different parade going. This parade featured more children, and wasn’t quite as large as the official parade on Monday, but it led to almost a quarter of the more than 600 pictures I finished the weekend with.

On to the pictures! The first one is an off-duty Superman, looking like a 70s pimp with that furry coat. I think the guy next to him is wearing a Batman costume, but I can’t be sure. This costume is particulary daring with the chilly weather.

Next up, a few Gnomes. The Gnomes aren’t what I love most about this photo, though. It’s the walking shower behind them… the curtain, the faucet… I think the shower costume is both creative and hilarious.

One of the many giraffe costumes I saw. I can pretty much guarantee that this guy was not nearly as cold as I was.

This next couples costume won’t make much sense to my American friends without context, but I spotted it right away- there’s a series of very cute commercials here for Kinder Riegel milk chocolate. I’ve embedded an example below, so you can see what the costume is all about.

When it’s time for lunch, you can’t go wrong at a snack bar with thiscast of characters.

During the first parade, I was particularly amused by this entire family of bears, each equipped with his or her own Honig (honey) pot with which to catch candy thrown from parade floats.

Another chocolate-inspired group costume.

There were so many great costumes that I put nine more into an image collage. The full sized individual shots of each of these are in the gallery linked near the top of this post.

On Monday morning, the parade started at 10:30, but I found a place closer to the end of the parade route than the start, so the streets actually looked this empty at first. Also, you can see that the windows on the parade route are often boarded up. I’m not sure if this is because of drunken revelry or if it’s because of flying chocolate bars, but this is a pretty common sight along the parade route during Carnival.

The empty streets didn’t last too long though, and before long there was plenty to see.

There was a lot of NSA/Google/Facebook/Data-Security themed stuff.

I made these six pictures into a collage because they were all together, and there’s a theme here. The green wigged, blind-folded people have eyes on their hands to represent the constant watching of data leeches like Facebook. I think the NSA camera stick holders in the previous picture were also with this group. Plus the green wigs were conga-lining, which was kind of fun.

I don’t know what this one was supposed to represent, but I thought it was neat looking.

I have no earthly idea what the story is with this group.

The German on this golden knight translates to “Your cellphone, your freedom.” I’m not entirely sure what they meant by that, but I think it was another one talking about data security.

There were lots of marching band and drum corps types of groups in various ornate uniforms…

…and one group playing marching washboards.

Some of the floats were single-rider deals, like this one. The head was turning back and forth.

More marching bands…

More single-rider floats…

I think after about six hours of playing the same song, you start to go a little crazy. Like this guy.

Once again, I have no clue at all what the deal is with the giant yellow heads that all have soul patches and deerstalker caps. I bet they’re heavy though.

There were lots of horses in the parade, but these two had the longest manes of any horse I’ve ever seen. Usually, parade horses have their manes trimmed very short- not so with these two.

The Zugordners (parade marshals) were utterly fascinating to watch. They all had these bright red jackets with the little black hats that were vaguely English Bobby shaped. I have no idea what they actually did, though, because the parade sort of moved itself along without any special pointing from this guy or his brethren.

…and on to the floats. The German on this one reads, “Fun Ghetto.” Inside the jail is someone drinking, a pair of humping dogs, and other forms of caricatures of fun.

I’m not sure if this one had a meaning other than just being Carnival-themed.

This next one might need some parsing from my German friends. I think the German text is supposed to translate to “Upgrade you will.” The goat has a rocket strapped to his back. And Yoda’s wearing a scarf for what I’m pretty sure is a local sports team. I don’t really get the full meaning. Any locals care to fill us in?

This one says “The Death Star, Washington” on the side. There were a few floats that had anti-American sentiment. All the NSA spying stuff has really caused some friction between our nations.

See?

About an hour after the parade ended, I walked over to the courtyard between the train station and the Cathedral. There were still an incredible amount of people moving through the city back to the train station.

I was wondering how the city recovered from something like the Rose Monday parade so quickly, and now I know. As soon as the parade was done, the cleaning crews came out. A veritable army of people with brooms gathered the majority of the debris into small piles, and another group came by with giant vehicle-sized vacuums. That giant white tube is a huge vacuum, sucking up piles of garbage from the street. I’ve never seen anything like it before, but I think it’s pretty nifty.

Have you ever been to a Carnival Parade?

Unexpected Homophobia In Stuttgart

On March 6, 2014May 30, 2020 By StevenIn International Travel - Inside Germany4 Comments

I just returned home on Tuesday afternoon from a trip that included Karlsruhe, a bit of Stuttgart, and Cologne for the Karneval festivities on Sunday and Monday. I’m still sorting those photos, and I’ll post about Karlsruhe and Cologne next week.

It was a very interesting weekend, though. When I was in Stuttgart, I saw a very large Polizei presence walking through the Hauptbahnhof on either side of a small group of people carrying pink flags. One of the flag carriers shouted, in English, “This is what democracy looks like!” I had no idea what he was talking about. Later on, I saw a second, much larger group of men without any noticeable flags or placards being escorted by another rather large group of Polizei.

The Stuttgarter-Nachrichten had the story- there is a plan to include more details about homosexuality in the sex-ed classes in Baden-Württemberg, and there was a homophobic protest against that change. What I saw was part of of a counter-protest, hence the pink flags. The Stuttgarter-Nachrichten has a great article about the protests here, including some pretty terrific photographs. I was mildly surprised to see the old “Gays are pedophiles” canard written out on a German protest sign, but it was there.

Here’s a few pictures I snapped in the Hauptbahnhof before I found out what was going on. If I had known this protest was happening, I would have tried to get over to Palace Square to see more.

Have you ever stumbled across an unexpected political protest?

Travel Tools: For The Frequent Concert Attendee

On March 3, 2014February 26, 2014 By StevenIn International Travel - Europe

(Editor’s note: This is not a paid advertisement. I get no kickbacks from writing about this stuff. It’s just things that I use regularly and find to be incredibly useful.)

The vast majority of my trips to new cities start with news of a concert that I want to see. I’ve written about this before, and even listed the concerts I’ve seen in a separate post. I wanted to write some posts that detail the tools that I use in my travels, and there are two tools in particular that are invaluable for the music-based tourist that I am.

The first tool is the means with which I find my concerts. In the old days, I would use magazines with concert listings, searches on eventim.de and ticketmaster.de, band announcements, and sheer luck to find my concerts.

In this enlightened Internet age, I mostly just use SongKick.com. I’m not sure when the website launched, but the iOS app launched in 2011, and the Android app was released the next year.

Here’s why SongKick is amazing- with your free account, the app will scan the music you have on your phone, and it will begin tracking the artists. If you use the website, you can have it import artists from your iTunes collection, your Spotify playlists, your Pandora history, or your last.fm tags. You can also select specific cities to watch. The site then begins to notify you (usually by e-mail, in my case) of the concert and tour details for the artists and cities that you’re watching. From that list, you can tag certain shows as “Track This” or “I’m Going” and they’ll show up on your Dashboard on the Website.

aprilsecond — I’ve been to three of these five venues. Can you guess which ones?

I’m currently tracking almost 1300 musical acts and more than twenty cities. I’ve even subscribed my calendar to the RSS feed of the concerts that I’ve started tracking.

I’ve only found two flaws in SongKick so far. The first is that there’s no sanity-check in the artist listings; it’s entirely user data driven. As a result, SongKick was tracking concerts for me from Zero Mostel. Considering that Zero has been dead since 1977, I can’t imagine that would be a very good show. (Or, maybe, it would be the best concert I’ve ever seen. In an infinite universe, anything is possible.)

The second flaw in the SongKick system is just overload: I now have so many amazing concerts at my fingertips that I can’t see them all. I simply don’t have the time or money I would need to see everything. I also haven’t figured out yet how to clone myself to see shows in different cities at the same time.

The second tool I wanted to mention here is a tiny item, but one which is absolutely necessary to really enjoy all these concerts: a good set of earplugs. I used to use the little ball-of-wax ear plugs you can buy for a few dollars in Walgreens or Boots, but they get dirty easily, and they block out too much of the sound. I wanted to find a better way so I did a little research- there are dozens of options and brands out there for high quality hearing protection. What I ultimately settled on was a pair of V-Moda Faders.

Faders are little metal ear-plugs with a variety of silicon “fittings” to go with different ear sizes and a little plastic case to keep them in your pocket. The Faders are connected by a string which can be removed, but the one time I took the string off, I dropped one of the plugs on the floor within seconds. Now I leave them attached. The V-Moda Faders claim to drop the volume of whatever you’re listening to by twelve decibels without sacrificing clarity. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that I’ve used them now for Cyndi Lauper, Ellie Goulding, and Gary Numan. For Gary Numan, I was standing right next to the stage, and I could hear everything clearly, without the distortion that high volume usually brings me. I also didn’t have to spend the half hour immediately after the show saying “What? What?!” to everyone that spoke to me. These ear-plugs work perfectly.

Do you have any favorite tools that you use for concerts, games, or other events?

Misplaced

On February 27, 2014May 30, 2020 By StevenIn Life In Germany5 Comments

A friend of mine wrote a short post this week on a certain blue-backgrounded social network about the fifteen year anniversary of the passing of a mutual friend. I realized immediately afterward that another funereal anniversary had just passed us by without my realizing it. Someone very special to me passed away eighteen years ago. Eighteen years and six days, actually- the anniversary slipped by without me realizing it this year.

This surprised me. In the beginning, it was never far from my mind, and for the first five or ten years I always tried to do special things on the anniversary of her death. More recently though, the dates slide past without notice, and without as much pain. I guess that’s a good thing, in the grand scheme of things, but it still makes me feel a bit like I’ve misplaced something. My mind is built on tangents, though, and thinking about this led me to think about Johannes Kepler.

Bear with me here, I promise there’s a point.

J-Kep (shut up, I can call him J-Kep if I want to) came to Regensburg in 1628, and became ill soon after. He died on November 15, 1630, at the age of 58, and was buried here. Regensburg is swarming with things named after Kepler. There’s a memorial house and museum, on a street named Keplerstraße. There’s also a pretty nifty memorial for him near the Bahnhof which I wrote about two years ago. There’s a pharmacy named after him, and some other places around town as well. The one thing that you won’t find in Regensburg, however, is Kepler’s grave site.

Although he was buried here, the grave site was lost when the Swedish army destroyed the churchyard in 1633, during the Thirty Years War. Kepler’s self-authored epitaph survived:

Mensus eram coelos, nunc terrae metior umbras
Mens coelestis erat, corporis umbra iacet.

I measured the skies, now the shadows I measure
Skybound was the mind, earthbound the body rests.

More than anything else, this makes me really want to find his grave site. I know it’s not something I could ever really do- I’m not a mapmaker or a scholar or a historian- but I hate to think of Kepler as simply having been misplaced, like we’ll find him next to some spare change between the couch cushions.

What’s the last thing you misplaced? Did you check between the couch cushions?

The Bishop’s Gone Walkabout

On February 24, 2014May 30, 2020 By StevenIn Life In Germany6 Comments

I was walking past Albertstraße this weekend when I noticed something peculiar. This pedestal was empty:

The last time I looked, which wasn’t all that long ago, the Bishop was still there, just as in this picture from a different blog post back in January of 2012. I don’t know if he was stolen, or if he was taken to be cleaned. He could be in the process of moving to another location, or perhaps he’s still there behind a complicated mirror-based illusion.

My neighbor tells me that he’s being restored and the moved to his original location. During the war, the statue was removed to be melted down for ammunition. Years later, the statue was found in a warehouse and installed in the current location.

That explanation is boring, though. I prefer, much like Grig, to think of him as battling evil in another dimension.