Wow. Though we were in Cologne for Karneval (Carnival/Mardi Gras/Etc) four years ago, we were only in town for a day or two and didn’t really experience much of Kölner Karneval. This year, we took the train down and arrived in the city on Saturday – the height of party time. The city goes absolutely nuts – drinking, singing (and more singing), crazy costumes- generally fighting off the cold and grey any way possible. Karneval time in the Rhineland is a little like Halloween in the States in that people get dressed up and there’s a lot of candy given out (though here it’s at 3-hour long parades where you have sweets thrown at you by old men dressed up as Napoleonic soldiers).

We danced and drank at a Brauhaus Saturday night (in costume, naturally – Meg was a man, I was a woman – don’t ask); Sunday we met up with some old friends for a parade in Sürth, where I grew up (I was a clown, Meg was some sort of rat princess); Monday is “Rosenmontag” (Rose Monday/Shrove Monday) and is the biggest day of German Karneval- we went to the big parade in the nearby town of Bonn, former capital of West Germany (I was burned out, Meg was a tree); Tuesday we actually got to be in a parade- we were part of the last float in a neighborhood parade in the “Südstadt” of Cologne (I was some sort of Elizabethan Viking, Meg was a tree again).

As they say in Kölsch (a dialect spoken only around Cologne) – “Alaaf!“