Not sure if you guys know, but the 11^th of Novem­ber at 11:11am is a very spe­cial day /​moment. In a few cit­ies /​regions in Ger­many — such as Köln (a.k.a. Cologne), Mainz, Düs­sel­dorf, etc. — it’s the start of the Karneval Saison, the „Fifth Sea­son“ for the people liv­ing in those parts of the coun­try..

Being from Ber­lin (where people typ­ic­ally have a rather ant­ag­on­istic opin­ion on all that buisi­ness) I do not know all that much about this stuff, but make sure you read the Wiki­pe­dia art­icle on it ;-)

Why am I men­tion­ing that? Well, purely by coin­cid­ence I happened to visit a good friend of mine that par­tic­u­lar week end, and when I tried to get some clas­sical break­fast ingredi­ents like Brötchen (a.k.a. bread buns /​bread rolls depend­ing on where you from) or Crois­sants it was simply not pos­sible to reach the bakery because of all the people on the street already get­ting wasted at 9am. Well, this con­tin­ued for the entire day, and it actu­ally looked like fun (I didn’t have any cos­tumes or the like on me, so I couldn’t really join in), and I’ve decided that at some stage, I wanna go with it, full time :-)

It just needs a bit of pre­par­a­tion to look as funny as all the other people… On the photo that was one of the many little bands that played some ran­dom semi-​rythmic noise to cel­eb­rate their drunke­ness :-)

Eat yoghurt and get cultured!