Newly equipped with our new car (a tiny Citroen C2 with GPS navigation – woohoo!), Kinga and I set off just after 7am on Saturday. The first thing we realized is that our GPS navigation software didn’t include Germany – doh! Just Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. Which is good for other weekends, but mostly useless for this one. Luckily we’d printed out directions from the internet, because we only managed about 20 minutes of following the rest of the crew in the Saffa-van (the van that Catherine and Claire, the South Africans, were issued by KPMG). Andrew R was driving, and it was a bit faster than we were really able to do that early in the morning in our little bug-car. It all worked out well though, and we arrived at our hotel without making a single wrong turn (obviously the combination of great driving and exemplary navigation skills, I say).
The key to Carnival is to get together a big group of people and dress them up in similar costumes. Also handy for trying to keep tabs on the rest of your group. The boys (about 8 of them anyway) stormed the costume shop first, and came across some monk outfits. Executive decision was made, and the boys were all wearing these monk outfits with weapons (swords, battleaxes etc) and later on added some bling (like big plastic medallions, gold coloured of course, with dollar signs). The girls decided to keep in theme, and so we became a group of about 7 nuns. It was kind of appropriate, because one of Cologne’s main attractions is the huge Cathedral in the centre of town. Although I did feel a little blasphemous when we saw a real nun by herself at the train station. Do you think she’s offended by it or do they just think its all a bit of fun? The crew from Belgium had already organized their costumes so we were all anticipating a very interesting clash when the two groups combined.
Cologne being the small town that it is, we ran into the Belgium lot without even meaning to, on a train platform. They were dressed in fluoro colours, the girls with pink and purple sparkly outfits and the boys either in bright pink or orange dress suits, or else in orange inmate style jumpsuits. A few of the boys (actually most of them) had also had a few beers on Thursday night and decided that it was a good idea to shave their heads (or half their heads) in some strange design so were all looking a little worse for wear. When Mike came up to us on the platform at first I didn’t recognize him!
In the afternoon we headed into town to find ourselves a beer tent to call our own. These marquees are just set up around the town. Beer and wine is served inside and they play great german oom-pah-pah music interspersed with regular pop music (though from the 90s). On first arrival, Milli said that she hoped they played Cotton-eye-joe (anyone remember that song?) and then it was about the fourth song after that! Very strange…
Carnival is full of people from almost every corner of the world. I spoke to Germans, Brits, a Greek guy, some French guys dressed like toothpaste and countless other randoms. So many strange outfits, including the chef from the cartoon movie Ratatouille, prisoners, Snow White, superheroes, German villagers, lions, chickens, ballerinas and the scores of men dressed as women (including heaps dressed as nuns!).
About halfway through the night, we were to meet up with the Belgium lot outside the Cathedral and take them to our tent. A few of us went, but first stopped off at a public toilet next to the cathedral (for 50 cents, by the way, pretty much all toilets you have to pay to use and there’s an attendant). While in there, I put down my bag, turned around and it was gone! Camera, all my photos, GONE! Other things, gone too. So upsetting. Luckily no money or credit cards, they were in my back pocket (jeans under a habit, so hot). So we found the Belgium lot then headed back to our tent and proceeded to take a million photos of me with everyone in order to make up for the ones I’d lost!
Eventually as we neared midnight it became apparent that Milli and I weren’t really going to go the distance, and so we snuck off to catch the train home. We stopped off at a kiosk (like a star mart) on the way to buy some water. Unfortunately, we managed to buy sparkling water, not still. Sparkling water is horrible, and German sparkling water was worse than average! So we stopped off at the next kiosk to get some still water, which is where I found out that the change I had been given at the last kiosk was counterfeit!!! Luckily only a five euro but still a big huge pain in the butt.
Milli and I finally made it onto the train with our tails between our legs and were so busy feeling sorry for ourselves that we missed our stop! So we had to get off and get a cab back to our hotel! It was pretty funny when we showed up at the hotel to find Will, Kishan and some of the other boys in the hotel lobby when we had left before them! They were like “Did you walk home?” We probably could have walked in the time it took us to get back, that’s for sure… So I went to my room and hit the pillow and was out cold. When my roommate Cat got back she spent 20 minutes banging on the door trying to wake me so she could get in!
On the Sunday, Kieran and I both wanted to get back to Amsterdam around 3pm-ish, so were going to be leaving a bit earlier than the others. We had a quick look around town (I ate a donut) and then we headed back to the car. We had directions with us and were pretty confident we could do it, because we just had to get back into Holland and then the GPS system would sort the rest out for us. Unfortunately, we got a little engrossed in conversation and missed our exit, which meant that we were on Highway 2 instead of Highway 3, and didn’t realize for roughly 100 kms. When we finally realized we were really low on gas and had no clue where we were. We couldn’t see any petrol stations so we had to pull off into some town and spend 20 minutes driving around looking for one. The one we found had no one who spoke English in it (seriously, Germany are way behind Holland in this respect) and so we had to just fill up and then go on our merry way back in the direction of Cologne! One thing that came out of all of it though is that I accidentally used my fake 5 euro to buy a fridge magnet at the petrol station and he didn’t even look twice at it! So there was definitely a silver lining.
We headed back towards Cologne, now on Highway 1, and ended up coming through some snow and some really gorgeous scenery. Given that my camera had disappeared, unfortunately no photos of that, so you’ll just have to take my word on it. By chance we stumbled across Highway 3 (which we were supposed to be on) and so we got back on it, all the time paying more attention to the directions than before!
All in all, we managed to turn a 2.5 hour trip into a 5 hour trip. We had a bit of a laugh about it on the way though, so it wasn’t too bad. We had to make a few bright side comments along the way, like “Hey, at least we aren’t those people” when we passed some car on the side of the road with a flat tyre.
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