It was Karneval time again several days ago. This year I managed (finally) to see the Rosenmontagszug (the carnival parade) in Koeln, which is considered as the center of the Karneval celebration in Rheinland. It was my second Karneval in this area and last year I joined the celebration in Duesseldorf. I remembered watching the Rosenmontagszug in cold and rain for three hours with Yuko, see my previous post.
The big carnival celebration starts from Thursday before Ash Wednesday at 11:11. We had Berliner at the office as what we had last year and after office hours Luam, Andreas, and I went to the Altstadt (Old town) of Duesseldorf. A lot of people have started wearing their carnival costume since that Thursday and it was fun to see their creativity :-) We were in the Altstadt around 18:30 and the area was already full of (drunk) people...We only walked around the Altstadt for a while and decided to leave, was so d*mn cold that evening.
On Friday I decided to start my movie weekend, the Oscar award announcement was on Sunday evening (which was Monday early morning for us in Germany and we were free on Monday, a good chance to see it live on TV), so it's kind of good excuse to watch some good movies that were nominated for Oscar. I watched Frost/Nixon in the previous weekend and Milk on that Friday, then Benjamin Button on Saturday, and The Reader on Sunday (thanks to Fai).
Cyna and Irma - Cyna's friend joined me to see a small parade in Koenigsalle on Sunday afternoon. It was small parade but quite nice, a lot of people also some children with their carnival costumes (so cute). I invited Cyna and Irma to my apartment after walking along the Rhine and around Altstadt. Cyna baked a cake ;-) and I cooked Pecel or actually I pushed them to finish Pecel that I have cooked in the morning. After that, it was watching Oscar time with Cyna who stayed overnight at my apartment. I slept around 6am, Cyna has 'gone' before that :-P
We woke up around 9:30am (less than 4hrs sleep for me :-P) and then got ready for Koeln. We planned to take the train around 10:40 but did not make it because there was no tram to Hauptbahnhof (main station) from my apartment. Not really big deal actually...it was around 20 mins walking but the plan to be in Koeln before 12 was ruined :-P. Finally after a bit waiting time and standing all the way to Koeln (so crowded as it was expected), we reached Koeln around 13. Koeln was already full of people with costumes. It was difficult to find a place that still enabled us to really see the parade, but we found a spot not so far away from Koeln Dom together with two Indonesian friends of Cynara that we met accidentally.
I think the parade in Duesseldorf last year was even better or maybe because the financial crisis also affected the spending to decorate all the cars, have no idea. But sure being in Koeln in Rosenmontag was quite experience. The people were 'wilder' and they knew (at least the people around me) all the Koeln songs by heart and they danced too even we stood so close to each other (which made us join them) :-P The most interesting thing was the generosity of the sweet things that were thrown. It was not only small candies or chocolates, but they also 'thrown' us boxes of pralines. I got one small and one big boxes and also some candies and chocolates (see picture below). It made us a bit hesitate to leave the parade before it was over (hehe), but we decided to leave at 16:00. On the way to Hauptbahnhof, we met another friend of Cyna with her Brazilian group. We talked a bit and took picture with Brazilian flags (and accused to be Brazilian by one of her friend :-P)... Then.. we returned to Duess, still found no tram to our apartments, was quite a struggle indeed but we were happy we made it :-)
