Day 167: Rosenmontag

Rosenmontag is the most important day of Cologne’s carnival. It basically consists of a parade of floats from the different participating associations. The floats are lavishly decorated, often escorted by horses, and from them they throw chocolate and sweets. But the real action happens around the parade, among the crowds watching it. Everyone, without exception, from 0 to 100 years old, is in fancy dress, the vast majority in costumes that clearly took hours of work to make (unlike mine: a lab coat and some tacky trousers we found in a shop for €2.99). People come from all over the Rhineland, something like Andalusians flocking to the Cádiz carnival, which is why the city is packed with people eager to have a great time.

We arrived a little late, at one in the afternoon. We had left Bielefeld late because at the car rental office we had a small problem (they claimed the fuel tank wasn’t completely full and made me go to the petrol station to put in the missing €1 worth of fuel to top it up (in Saxony 1 l = €1.35)), and then we missed the train. But in the end we were really lucky, because on the train we boarded there was a group of German “fifty-somethings” who adopted us as fellow revellers and gave us food and drink throughout the whole journey (a couple of the women wouldn’t stop flirting with my friend Oscar). On the same train we also met another group of Spaniards from Dortmund who were on their way to the big party. So the entire train ride (three hours) was great fun.

When we arrived in the city on the Rhine, the first thing we did was head to the hostel to drop off our rucksacks and bags. Then, straight to the cathedral to join the rest of the Spaniards already celebrating. We looked great in our costumes:

Since we had already been to this party two years earlier, we knew its golden rule: Never buy beer at a bar or street stall, you just wait for someone to come along with a crate of beer and offer them to you — it’s a thousand times cheaper. Once you’ve got the beers, you simply go with the flow: chat with people, take part in silly contests (the kind that involve as many nationalities as possible), and eat lots of Wurst (sausages).

Later it was time to move elsewhere: it had been snowing all day and now it was starting to rain and was freezing cold. At that point I got lost — I let my friends go off to look for something or other and went instead with a group of Germans to show me the city’s party spots, because you can’t just experience things from the foreign-Erasmus point of view, you also have to try to immerse yourself in German culture.

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