Fasching 2015: The Drunken Debauchery Continues

Last year, I posted a little bit about Fasching. To recap, Fasching is the German equivalent of Carnival or Mardi Gras. It starts the Friday before Ash Wednesday and lasts until the Tuesday before. (Fat Tuesday if you were raised Catholic). Western parts of Germany with heavy Catholic influence throw the biggest Fasching or Fasnacht parties. The word for the celebration depends on where in Germany you live. Some areas will still call it Carnival, particularly if they have heavy French influence.

The idea behind Fasching/Fasnacht/Carnival is that your sins are forgiven prior to the start of the Lent season. So, you have one last weekend to "live it up" before focusing on the Lent season. Since Catholic religion is hardly practiced any more in Germany, the party is less about the religious ideas behind Lent and more of another excuse to throw a nice party.

One of the main components of Fasching is dressing up like a "fool." Whereas Carnival in Venice brings about the image of extravagantly dressed masked party guests, you can pretty much dress however you like for Fasching. The most common costumes are head-to-toe animal outfits complete with hoods. This is probably partially because of the cold, wet weather in February in Germany. I wanted to dress up as a cow, but the store did not have my size costume. Instead, Greg convinced me to dress up as Princess Leia since he was going as Darth Vader.

We live within easy walking distance of our city's downtown area. However, before we could make it to the party, we had to walk through our very American neighborhood dressed like Star Wars characters. Can I just take this moment to comment: Americans do not know how to have fun. Seriously. We know how to ruin otherwise fun things.

None of the other Americans walking to the parade were dressed. We got a lot of crazy looks at first. Once we crossed from our American neighborhood into "real" Germany, all of the Germans were dressed up and partying. We actually got a lot of great comments from them. Small kids would yell "Leia" and wave. The girls at the beer stand scolded Greg for not dressing up as Hans Solo. We made a lot of random German friends for the day. They taught us the "correct" way to take shots from their little bottles of plum flavored vodka and how to sing along to polka music. By 9 pm, we were so exhausted we walked home and fell right to sleep. Our original plan was to attend the parade in the town across the river from us the following day, but we decided to stay home.

There are a few things that I will miss about Germany when we leave, and one of them is the sense of community here that just doesn't exist in the states. The idea of throwing a "town party" in the streets would never happen in America. Bonding with someone over a similar costume is something that would probably only occur at a college bar on Halloween. Germans have a reputation for being unfriendly, which can occasionally be true, but they are wonderfully inviting to all outsiders at social events. If you try your best to belong, they'll try their best to accept you. Most importantly, they know how to have fun while keeping it safe and acceptable for people of all ages.

Local: Fasching (or Fasnacht Day) 2014

I remember when I was very young living in Pennsylvania and "celebrating" Fasnacht Day. For my non-German-American readers, Fasnacht Day is better known as Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, Carnival or, more simply put, the day before Lent begins. A fasnacht is like the German equivalent of a King's Cake, for lack of better comparison. It's a huge, fatty doughnut possibly made out of potatos. As a kid, I don't remember doing anything for Fasnacht Day other than acknowledging it. I'm not sure if I've ever actually had a fasnacht, but I would probably take a whoppie pie from an Amish bakery before a fasnacht anyway.

A few months ago, we were over at our friend's house flipping through a catalog about happenings in our area when I saw an advertisement for a Fasching cruise. I immediately asked if Fasching was the same as Fasnacht Day, and no one seemed to know what I was even talking about. Turns out, Fasching is basically the German Carnival and Faschnut Day is, of course, still the Tuesday before Lent right in the middle of the Fasching celebration.

Fasching is basically a giant, week long party here in Germany. Most of it involves dressing up in costumes (like Halloween), parades, heavy drinking and breaking glass all over the streets. Occasionally, you'll also see young men trying to persuade women to kiss them, but mostly it's just drunken craziness in costumes. Yet somehow, it's also relatively family friendly.