Alaaf everybody!
Yeah, I know this strip needs a bit of explaining. I planned it in German and it made no sense in translating certain bits of it.
As some of you might know I live in Cologne, Germany. Which is Germany’s capital of carnival! Thursday hell will break loose in this city for entire seven days! There will be heavy drinking, silly costumes, loud music and parades.
Everybody will be dancing around in the streets! Well, everybody except for me. I simply can’t do it. Friends tried to drag me to carnival partys for years now, but never succeeded. I will try to explain the reasons for this in the next strips…
P.S.: “Alaaf” is the official carnival greeting in Cologne!:)
quick get shotgun ready and blow some heads off before it’s too…. CRAP!!!!!!! >_<
Forced frivolity? Say no more. But at least there’s carnival food, so it can’t be all bad. (Mmmmmm. Carnival food…)
Well i live in Brazil and i HATE carnival! Fortunately i live very very far from any place that has real parties and the city where i live don’t really care about it anyway.
Augh! I’m Dutch and we have the same stuff too. Well, the northern part (thankfully) doesn’t.
It’s all zany “fun” where cities get completely nonsensical names and other such baloney. “Alaaf” is the call-sign of the Carnaval celebrator here too.
Guys! Thanks for your comments here. It’s great to see the responses from all over the World, really. Brazil, The Netherlands…
@DHJones I may not have paid attention if you said it before… where do you live?
@Cece Do You have carneval in your country?
One thing from me on the subject: It’s not that I am against dressing up or having a party. The opposite is the case. In fact I love it. I put on Zombie make-up on Halloween and I also drink
alcoholic beverages and like to sing in a loud voice from time to time.
It’s just the forced fun, the ‘music’ I totally dislike and people getting drunk and sometimes behaving – well, let’s just say in some parts of the city you might have trouble avoiding to step in urine or vomit.
Kenai, Alaska it get’s more colder than any other state in USA
I’m sure that you’ve all heard of Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) which is held in New Orleans, Louisiana in the United States just before Lent. Is this a sort of German version of that? (I live in Indianapolis, Indiana, and the closest thing we have to it is the Indy 500 Festival parade the Saturday before the race. A bit more restrained, but no less colorful.)
Reynard was talking about Mardi Gras, and that’s definitely something I want to see one day, but in the place where it originated: France (at least, I’m pretty sure it originated in France). Way more wild and crazy than the average ‘Pancake Day’ which you get here in Britain.
You never get carnivals in England. Ever. It’s just not the English thing to do. The closest thing is a street party and you only get those when some royal anniverary of some kind has occured. Which is kind of a shame, because carnivals sound kinda fun and not many people give a damn about the royals :<
As Reynard said; the Southern US has a tradition of celebrating Carnivale, or Mardi Gras, the biggest one being in New Orleans. The protestant Northern states are more like the Brits. The closest we get is the State Fairs, which are more like harvest festivals, and are held safely away from city centers. They never even served alcohol at our State Fair until last year! .
But whatever the celebration, you know there’s going to be lots of food sold from carts and made entirely from grease and sugar! I’m betting that the heavenly smells of deep fried confections draws our plucky heroine out of hiding.