Karneval in Trier

As I noted in a recent post, it's Karneval time in Germany. Today is Rosenmontag, (Rose Monday), which is the biggest day for celebrating carnival around these parts. That means, as you will see in the photos below, dressing up in wacky costumes, drinking heavily in the street at lunchtime, watching the parade go past, and yelling Helau! at the top of your voice to everyone in the parade, and indeed anyone else you see.

As a curious but really rather detached observer, I ventured out at lunchtime today to watch the Rosenmontagszug (Carnival parade) wend its way through the streets of the Trier inner-city. The photos below are a selection of what I saw.

It's not just those in the parade itself who dress up, but pretty much everyone. These clowns were waiting patiently at the end of my street for the arrival of the parade.

This year, even the police leading the parade were dressed up, either as bank robbers or terrorists, I can't decide (see face mask).

Presumably expecting trouble, the Police had also recruited some very young officers (above) and some reinforcements from abroad (below).

Every possible vantage point for watching the parade had been seized.

I think this may be the first parade I've ever seen which included a mobile bar in the parade itself. (Only in Germany!)

There was plenty of fun to be had (and sweets to be caught) for the little ones too. The goodie bag below belonged to a sex or seven year old girl. She'd been collected the sweets and popcorn and other goodies thrown from the parade floats so effectively that she had to get another bag just minutes after I took this photo.


Some of the watching crowd took their job of yelling "Helau" very seriously indeed.

A lot of work had gone into some of the costumes in the parade. From wild animals...


to fruit...

to insects. The whole range was covered.

But it wasn't just the costumes that had had a lot of effort put into them. The decoration of some of the floats was pretty impressive too.


This being Germany, the clean-up was exceptionally well organised and began less than 10 minutes after the last float had gone past.


But, as you can see above and below, there was plenty of cleaning up to do.

Tags:
Trier
Karneval
Germany