Karneval in the Cologne area

I am not familiar with Carnival in Brazil, neither am I a German Karneval connoisseur. Nevertheless, I'll try to do a little parallel between Brazilian and German Carnival.

I have been to the Karneval in a small city around Cologne, a friend of mine grew up there and invited me to the festivities this year. Apparently, as I was told, the idea is the same as the Kölner one although is it naturally reduced in amount of people and there is a sort of a more familiar/countryside feeling. It looked very neat. 

The basic idea of all Carnivals seem to be the same everywhere: a couple of weekdays off, heavy drinking and a well organized parade.

I won't go into the formalities which indeed differ i.e. how the parade is organized, categories judged in order to elect a winner, what days it happens and symbolic/historic meanings of certain things. I'll keep my argument to 2 general aspects that I find very different from the Brazilian Carnival. As one can expect there is no sex-appeal in the German one, besides the fact that drunken people are usually more willing to get wild. In the parade I have seen the main thing was to collect candies and flowers thrown by the paraders. I wasn't really enthusiastic about that but the whole bunch of kids and some guys definitely were. I was told that flowers are used to get kisses on the cheek from ladies (that might the sex-appeal part) but it didn't seem to be so appealing and I actually didn't see it happening. One can notice at the picture above kids holding bags and well-positioned to collect candies. In the one bellow one of the paraders in action.

The other issue was that, compared to Brazilian Carnival music and dancing play a secondary role. There are no well fit ladies demonstrating her dancing skills as one can see in the picture above. I had the feeling that dressing up to watch the parade was very common.  So, costumes were the deal since everyone paraders and spectators really did put some effort into that. From my point of view, in Brazil just paraders really go deep into dressing and heavy make-up.

Karneval in the Cologne area theoretically begins with a celebration on November 11th at 11:11, day of the presentation of the main characters of the Karneval (Farmer, Virgin and the Prince) but celebrations are then suspended until the days before the Lent when it actually takes place. For this reason at the Karneval I have been there were 111 parades cars. There is more informational about the Cologne Karneval at wikipedia. I can only suggest visiting this celebration, it is great craic. Alaaf!