Big fat Tuesday in Munich

The city center in Munich gets a little crazy for the last three days of carnival. The locals don costumes and down lots of booze in one big street party (and at lots of littler parties). It’s fun to see an entire city party together.

The costumes people were wearing were much more... themed than the ones I remember from carnivals in Halle. There the idea was merely to dress weirdly, not necessarily as something or someone. Put on a pink feather boa, wrap some aluminum foil around your arms, and stick a pipe cleaner out of your ponytail and you were good to go.

Popular costumes that we saw this year included Mexicans, Chinese, and anything involving black face. The Mexicans wore blankets and sombreros (and probably would have been kicked right off a Zurich tram). Naturally the Chinese wore clothing with random Chinese characters all over the place – as all Chinese people tend to wear. The black face costumes were the most bizarre – while some donned afro wigs or tribal hunting gear, other folks seemed to be wearing completely normal clothing, but just with black face paint. And then there was a herd of Smurfs.

I sent Scott out alone to watch the famed dance of the market ladies on Tuesday morning. I skipped it because 1) someone had to wait for our Ikea delivery to come and 2) I'm not a big fan of crowds. Instead I ventured out later in the day, when the crowd had spread out a bit (and gotten significantly drunker). The amount of broken glass all over the ground was unnerving, at least to us - it didn't seem to be bothering the revelers prancing through it on all sides of us. We, on the other hand, were plotting out each step as if walking through a snake pit. I'm taking this as proof that we were much too sober for the situation at hand. Next year we’ll know to drink ahead.