Happy Fasching—or not really?

Dear users, dear authors,
Is there anything going on with Fasching this year, or not so much?

November 11—I’m curious to see if we’ll hear anything from our neighbors tonight. They’re active in a carnival club, and before the pandemic, they’d usually be out on the patio every weekend doing their makeup and so on.

I’m not really a carnival fan myself anymore—I only go to parades when it’s sunny. 

We’re from Cologne, but we’ve been total Carnival refugees for many years now. It just kept getting more crowded and unpleasant, with more drunk and aggressive people—that’s not our thing.
We used to live in the Südstadt, right near the parade route—back then, you could barely leave the house for days on end. We’ve since moved to the very outskirts of the city, but we still make sure we’re far enough away during Carnival.

I always enjoy watching the Carnival parades when they wind their way through our city. I’d planned to go to Stuttgart for Rose Monday and watch the parade, but it never worked out. Now I try to avoid all the hustle and bustle.  

Carnival has never really been my thing.

I’m funny when I feel like it—
completely independent of any specific date.

I used to love going to Carnival events and dressing up. But in recent years, that’s faded a bit.
Most of the time I had to work the next day, so you can’t really party that hard.
In Norway, it wasn’t such a big deal, so I didn’t do much of it.

But when I had to work on November 11th, I heard there was a small Carnival parade going through town, and they passed by our nursing home, where we could watch from the balcony. We brought some of the residents down to watch.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have my cell phone handy. Too bad.

I used to love dressing up my kids when they had carnival celebrations at preschool. I improvised a lot myself and decorated their costumes with sequins.