Our First Fasching

Fasching is a celebration like Carnival--party hard before Ash Wednesday and Lent.  I can't say we partied too hard, but we did have fun dressing up, seeing a small-town parade, eating Berliners, and playing/hearing some good accordion music!

We watched a few of the big parades on TV with some friends.  I can't remember the exact numbers now, but tons of candy (mostly chocolate) is thrown.  In the slideshow above, I included a woman watching the parade from her window.  On TV they showed people leaning out their windows with baskets attached to long poles so they could catch the candy!  Some friends of ours who went to one of those big parades said they literally couldn't carry all their candy/chocolate back to their car!

The best thing thrown to us was bakery rolls.  The oddest thing was little packages of Kleenex.  We also got popcorn, which is really rare here.

I got a kick out of all the fun hats people wore.  I also enjoyed watching Robyn jam to a song played during the parade that she learned at her school Faschings party.  Who would've thought we'd come to Germany for her to learn Portuguese?  She said there was a fun dance competition/game at her school party where the participants had to dance on a a newspaper.  Every time the music stopped, they had to fold the newspaper in half.

So, it was different to have a kind-of-like Halloween holiday in February, but made the month more fun.