Fasching or Karneval - when adults and kids party together, Germany (Feb 2017)

I have only heard of the Mardi Gras, the Pride Parades and such from the books, magazines, even movies. When I came to Germany earlier this year, I was told there would be a carnival in February. Some called it Fasching (in southern part of Germany & Austria), Faschnacht (mostly used in Swabia and Switzerland) or just Karneval (as in Carnival, mostly used in the northwest part of Germany) and Mardi Gras in the USA, but they all meant the same thing, a celebration. This means there's parades, lots of partying, loud music et cetera. Karneval is celebrated every year usually around February, but preparations could start as early as November the year before. The Karneval celebration officially ends with the start of Lent (a period preceding Easter), so Catholics would be more familiar with this, I'm not a Catholic or a Christian, so I had NO IDEA what was going on.

I didn't know the history of Fasching, or Karneval, you could Google it, because from my participations in a few parade this year, I could see nothing religious about this celebration, probably the religious part of it was kept for the churches. Karneval was ALL about celebration. My boss was involved in the preparation of parade, well, everyone participated one way or another in the parade, some businesses donated raw materials for the preparations of carnival floats, some loaned their tools to those prepping up the floats, my boss loaned his huge workshop to his grand-nephew to prepare a carnival float. These floats are then normally pulled by tractors (considering the agriculture sector is still quite big here in the south west part of Germany), and smaller ones were by cars or trucks.

This was the one made in my boss' workshop. This was taken during the parade.

I didn't know what the big hoo-haas were about the celebration, while my boss wasn't really too keen on big parties, he too seemed excited over it. We went to 4 parades, the first one in Niederlosheim, where I met a lovely family, a mother with 5 kids, the youngest was the cutest. Now, I cannot help but post his little picture here. Let me explain, I am here in Saarland, away from big cities, so children weren't too familiar with 'alien-looking' people (well, considering I'm not white like them). Most children who weren't exposed to foreigners almost always looked at me, either in awe, shocked, afraid or just a plain frown. This little boy was the first one to smile at me, after about a month in Germany, in a strange land where I understand nothing, he smiled at me. So I stayed with the family while waiting for the parade to pass. He was enjoying himself.

He couldn't see the carnival floats as he was so tiny, so he wanted his mom to hold him up, but she was a tiny woman herself, and was tired quickly from holding him. So I offered to hold him. He was excited every time a float passed by, I didn't know what he was mumbling about anyways, from the baby-talk and the Saarlandish dialect/German. The only word I could make out was tractor and he was in awe with the HUGE machines, so was I honestly.

See how big the wheels of the tractor is? This isn't the biggest, I didn't get to take the picture of the biggest tractor, I was carrying the little one.

So what was going on on the floats? There were people, loud music, some groups had little marching bands, playing Karneval songs. Some just marched and shouted "Alleh hopp!" I have no idea what it meant, sort of like a battle call or something, the words borrowed from French (since we're very near the French border, allez = means go)

People watching the parade would cheer "alleh hopp" too~

People on the floats were almost ALL in costumes, according to the theme of their float and they threw candies and chocolates for kids to pick up and offered liquor and beer to adults, wonderful, everybody was happy. Okay, some adults catched the candies too~ Many were in costumes, all kinds of it. Kids were the most excited with candies thrown out from these floats, some came prepared, in BIG plastic bags to carry home their snacks stash for the month haha.

Candies were thrown, alcohol was offered, loud music, all was good.

Adults and kids, everyone loved dressing up.

Giant gnomes too.

The one in Nunkirchen that I went to was a night parade, and there were laser light shows, but I was standing too near to actually see what was going on, all I saw were laser lights, haha.

There were lights on each and every float, quite interesting.

This one was rather cute, cartoons and all, with a little tiny tractor pulling it.

The casino's float, fancy~ I heard this casino was pretty big and they were rich too! (who which casino isn't rich haha)

Herr Trump, it looked pretty real too hahaha~

The zombies float.

The trojan horse, rather fancy.

Air-force team, probably thinking about Top-Gun.

Then we went to the third one in Wadern, which was a little short, but the lanes were narrow, so everybody was near everybody, it was crowded, noisy but really fun. Even the elderly were excited with all the loud music and funny costumes. It was the coldest in Wadern, the wind was strong, coming from the higher plains but it was really a great experience.

The last parade we went to was in Büschfeld and it was a very nice day, wasn't as cold as the previous two parades but it wasn't as crowded as before, and the carnival floats were not as many too, I guess many were too drunk from the night before. The parades were going on almost everyday for a week, the one in Nunkirchen was the only held at night. It was too dangerous to drive at night after all the drinking.

There were really some nice music going on too, sometimes they play in between, before the parade pass through, sometimes they joined the parade. Some of the music they played were karneval songs, like this one, my favourite karneval song, Schenk mir dein Herz (with my minimal Deutsch I could make out it meant Give Me Your Heart), almost everyone knew the song and people were singing along to it too.

You can look up the original song on youtube, given the right place, mood and crowd, a real good party song... or maybe I'm just old-school haha.