Helau!!! (that's a carnival greeting in Duesseldorf). We just had a big celebration of carnival in Duesseldorf! I know there is a big celebration in Koeln, our neighboring (and also rival) city, but I only recently knew that there is also a big celebration in Duesseldorf. It's actually one of the highlight of Rhineland carnivals, together with the celebration in Mainz and Koeln. This year is my first carnival in Duesseldorf.
As other carnival celebration in other countries, this celebration is also originated from religious reason. The carnival celebration is actually started from 11th of November every year, but the real big celebration is started on the Thursday one week before Ash Wednesday, in a so called Altweiberfastnacht. The day when women take the power and the tradition is they cut the tie of men around... see more on www.karneval-in-duesseldorf.de.
After that, every day you can see a lot of people with funny costumes. I have seen the carnival celebration in Eindhoven before and I always admire the effort that all the people put for their carnival costumes. I was surprised when last Thursday in my office we sort of celebrate the carnival by having a lot of Berliner (a filled doughnut covered by sugar usually with strawberry filling) in the kitchen. It was really funny when later that day I had a discussion with Daniela at her office, Peter another colleague came by and shouted Alaaf! (that's greetings from Koeln, since they are both originally from Koeln) then they sang together a carnival song and pushed me to follow them knocking the table. That was really funny :-P
The big celebration is on Monday (we had holiday on Monday) and is called Rosenmontag when they have a big parade (Rosenmontagszug). I had an appointment with Yuko, a Japanese friend of mine from my German class. We met several minutes before the parade started and finally got a nice location to stand. It was a bit rain and cold. But the parade was great, I shouted a lot of 'Helau' today :-P I finished 1 Gb of my memory card and just realized that I was wet and almost freezing. That was after almost 3 hrs standing in the crowd :-P
