Last week was Fasching, which is what they call Mardi Gras in Southern Germany. Many towns have huge parades and celebrations in the weeks leading up to the last Tuesday before Lent. We didn’t make it to any of the earlier ones due to everything going on, but I was able to join a few friends to attend one town’s celebrations, the day of.
We met at the train station at 6am and made the one hour drive south to Rottweil, which has a big celebration every year. We were parked and had found a spot on the parade route by about 7:30. It was so cold and I did not dress accordingly! Luckily, there were plenty of glühwein sellers and the glühwein kept us warm until the sun was up.
The most common Fasching traditions are to dress up in costumes and the Fools’ Parade. Each town has several ‘Fools’ Guilds’ and membership is passed down for generations- they are very hard to just get into. Each guild has its own style of costume and mask and they all get together to form a parade through the town, performing pranks on spectators along the way. The fools and witches will give out candy to the kids along the way, and the adults are rewarded with shots if they are pranked.
The parade was pretty long; it took about two hours for all of the fools to make their way through town, accompanied by big brass bands. Our group got plenty of attention from the fools, probably because we stood out as Americans. When the parade was over, we did a short walk through town and then drove back to Stuttgart and were back by noon. Overall, it was a very cool experience. Next year, we will try to see a couple of different ones; a friend who had been to a couple this year said Rottweil’s was very tame compared to others.
On Friday, Brooklyn and Ryan went straight from school to meet their ski club for another ski trip. This weekend, they were heading to Ski Amadé, in Austria, one of the biggest ski areas in the World. We were actually pretty jealous after attending the trip meeting and hearing about everything they would get to do. We are planning a family trip there next year now.
Matt and I originally had planned to go away for the weekend but we decided to give his knee another weekend of rest. I stayed busy catching up on things around the house. Saturday night, we did make it to dinner with some of our friends, who also had kids on the ski trip.
The kids didn’t get home until almost 10pm Sunday night. As we were pulling away from the school, we asked them how it went, but they were already asleep in the car.
Gilcrests Abroad 