featuring…
♫ Various Artists, A Celebration Of New Orleans Music
🍺 Yankee & Kraut Maracujizzle Brombizzle
Words & photos (except where Indicated): Vincent Abbate
Something unusual happened this morning. My adopted hometown made CNN.
Cologne is a large German city of over a million. But it’s not London, Paris, Brussels or Berlin. So we don’t often see international camera teams wandering around town. But they were here yesterday, capturing the images that surprised me today at breakfast: thousands of locals in their clown suits, young and old, filling one of the main squares, smiling, singing, swaying, and having a ball.
The occasion was Cologne’s famous Carnival celebration. As in Rio and New Orleans, the people here like to blow off steam in a big way in the days prior to Ash Wednesday and the start of the Lenten season. They’ve been doing so for roughly 200 years. I’ve been here for the last 30 of those and confess I have never truly warmed up to the tradition. Sometimes I join in, often I don’t.
The Carnival societies with their meetings and weird Colonial officer-looking uniforms; the swarms of visitors from other towns and cities who come here to make merry, booze it up and piss all over the place; the local anthems, sung in a dialect I will never learn, endlessly singing the praises of the Stadt am Rhing. All of it leaves me feeling like an outsider and a killjoy.
Photo (c) Festkomittee Kölner Karneval
Now if the streets and pubs were full of the sounds heard on A Celebration Of New Orleans Music, well … it might be a different story.