Filed under: Travel
Beats, beers, confetti and caipirinhas at Berlin’s Karneval der Kulturen (25th-28th May, 2007)
It’s over for another year. On the streets of Berlin, the last of the confetti has been swept away, the last of the empty bottles have been traded in for hard cash, and the last diamante g-string has been sent to the dry cleaners.
Berlin’s Karneval der Kulturen (Carnival of Cultures) lasts only four days, but still manages to pack a serious party punch. Part of the city’s social calendar since 1996, this year’s festival featured more than 4 500 artists from 70 nations, a good chunk of whom are from Berlin itself. The Carnival has a strong emphasis on topics German refer to as ‘multi-kulti’, and attracts over a million visitors every year.
The merriment revolves around Bluecherplatz in Waterlooufer, where the Street Festival hyperstimulates all the senses. Four stages and countless roaming performers entertain the crowds, who wander aimlessly from stall to stage to stall, clutching their cut-price caipirinhas and munching on exotic treats. Every culture you can think of seems to have a stall representing its food here, and this diversity is echoed in the voices of people around us.
All of the hippies of Germany and the surrounding nations appear to have assembled here to sell beads and other trinkets, and there’s an entire stall devoted to selling Orgasmatrons, surrounded by tire kickers who are there for a free head scratch. There’s a van selling over a hundred different international beers, and over at the Greens stall, they’re drumming up support by handing out helium balloons to messy-hair boys with suspiciously high-pitched voices. There’s a stall run by a school trying to improve its profile after an in-class kidnapping, and an Australian stall disgracing the nation by selling Fosters, XXXX, faux road signs, bamboo didges and other pieces of ‘traditional’ Australiana.
We hang out at the African stage, and watch women dancing to frantic beats with unhappy looking pythons strung around their necks. Handsome African fellas in extravagant shirts flog scam bags while we watch what appears to be a three metre high dried grass skirt perform a tarantella on stage.
All the while, the sky has been growing darker, the humid air ever more pregnant with threat of rain. We decide it might be a good idea to go home, and we try to work out if we have time to make it to the train station before the sky makes good on its threat.
The air dies. Fluttering leaves become perfectly still. Slowly, the thousands-strong crowd realises that the clouds aren’t joking. All of a sudden, everyone starts running towards the limited scraps of shelter within the park. We race over to a nearby building, and stand under a small roof while the sky falls in.
There are a lot of people in this little dry patch, and we are glad to have a large caipirinha to tide us over. The rain is hitting the swamped grass with almost tropical violence. Then it starts to hail. Big hailstones, as big as bantam eggs, pelt down hard enough to bruise anyone foolish enough to be still outside. Children are passed through open windows for safekeeping. This is kind of fun.
The storm eventually passes, with little more fallout than a few fallen branches. The night is filled with parties, official and otherwise, and we go and see some average reggae and ska in a venue that could have hosted any of your high school socials.
The next day is Sunday. We arise with reluctance and eventually leave the house mid-afternoon to see the Street Parade.
Partly filling the emotional gap left by the loss of the Love Parade, the Street Parade is the pumping, thumping, skip-a-beat heart of the Carnival. This year, the parade has over ninety floats, two thirds of which we miss due to our tardy arrival. We buy a cheap, warm beer, and a not-so-cheap, chilly caipirinha, and throw ourselves into the pulsing crowd. It seems we’ve missed all the boring floats, with at least 30% of the last third being devoted to large sound systems and extravagant costumes.
“Poor but sexy” is the slogan the Berlin mayor has coined to sell the German capital to the world. Which must be the explanation for the float with the tarty-looking giant papier-mâché woman attacking the pig with a hammer. Today at least, the slogan isn’t too far off. Behind the Nicacaraguan float, men flounce about in open-chested shirts, while saucy-looking women in colourful costumes feverishly gyrate, one waving a rubber chicken around her head. Hippies that could have come straight from an Aussie forest blockade parade about waving a graphically illustrated poster advocating eco-porn – “Fuck for the Forests!”. Strait-laced looking middle-aged Rheinish belly dancers jiggle their way down the street to traditional German Karneval music, their lurid costumes protected from the occasional cloudburst by plastic sheeting. And on the electronica trucks, mini-clubs run mini-bars, where disco-bunnies with mega fros and micro-fishnets shake it like the proverbial to thumping house and ragga.
The street parade is like visiting a dozen clubs over a few hours, except the drinks are cheaper and the entry is free. The boundary between audience and performers is blurred, with people stepping in and out of the parade at will. Locals sit sipping cups of tea on their specially decorated balconies, and wags on the top storeys of flats periodically lob water bombs at passing floats. We spend some time stumbling along behind a float playing traditional Caribbean Carnival music. “soca, Soca, SOCA! soca, Soca, SOCA!” The beats are infectious, relentless, and with enough alcohol, make everyone dance like monkeys on heat.
Our short exposure to the joys of Soca lead us to the Carnival’s Glow Party. Said to be an important part of Trinidadian Carnivals, glow parties are held under black lights, and everyone is encouraged to wear white for the full luminescent effect. This one is at the Lido, a popular venue for various flavours of electronica.
At the club, the floor is alive with a mass of glow worms bouncing to the music. There’s loads of Soca, hands-in-the-air house and really late, really cheesy electro. Clemens is two metres of glowing divinity, in his full-length white Damascene robe, dancing like a fool to the beats and beer. We dance until it’s light, which isn’t that late, but scares the hell out of us every time we go outside to use the loos.
Too late, we begin the stagger home. We sleep through the rest of the Karneval, but don’t feel like we’ve missed a thing.
