The first tale of alcohol-fuelled frolics I feel I should impart is that of the fateful trip to Djazz about a month ago. Except I can't impart too much because I don't remember too much. I'll tell you about what I do recall. We pre-lashed at Kate's on a dangerous mix of vodka and Nuwang* before tottering off to the club around 11.30. Upon arriving at the club, we went to dump our stuff in the unmanned cloakroom, where there was a piano that I drunkenly attempted to play, and a tambourine, which I stole.** I believe some dancing may have followed this, though what we were dancing to I cannot say. Then came the clincher, the point of the evening from which all that follows has been entirely wiped from my knoweldge; somebody, and I name no names (Kate), got the shots in. That one drop of sambucca destroyed whatever chance any of us had of knowing what the hell happened that night, and between that point and finding Kelsey at 7am sat in Starbucks (drinking a frappé and babbling about some bloke named Samsung), I only recall a total five minutes worth of events. The rest of the night we have subsequently attempted to piece together through photographic evidence, but that in itself is so bizarre that it hasn't helped much: photos in front of the Naked Man statue, photos outside Kate's building, photos outside Kate's school... they track our drunken trail across Duisburg and still we have no recollection of any of it. I guess we'll never know.
You would have thought that after that little escapade I would have left it at least a week before daring to touch the Devil Drink again. Not a bit of it. Try less than 24 hours. For it was the good Matthew Endersby's leaving party and there was no way he was going to let us get away with spending the night on only lemonade and water. The night kicked off in very British style with a wonderful traditional roast dinner courtesy of Cerys. Yum. Then there were cornflake crispy cakes for dessert courtesy of Sammy. Double yum. Then, after a handing over of pressies and cards, not to mention a speech written by Lyndsay which, in her absence, I attempted to deliver with a straight face, we just got smashed. I'm pleased to say I curbed myself on the previous night and just got moderately merry, but not so Kelsey, who somehow acquired an odd mix of a someone else's wine and cherry liquor, before bumbling off out the flat in search of God knows what and causing a full-scale panic among the rest of us who had no idea where she'd gone. Apparently she'd been talking to some people from Manchester, but whatever, she gave me a heart-attack. When we did eventually decide to go out, we left one of our number, a little worse-for-wear, behind and set about buying cocktails-to-go from a nearby bar to get us through the oh-so-arduous walk to the club. Which we reached, eventually, in varying degrees of a state. I think the rest of the night passed without drama (except a truly foul cheeseburger at 4am) and, needless to say, my body was not thanking me for that weekend for some days to come.
You'll be pleased to know that I take a break from heavy drinking for a couple of weeks after this. My ravaged liver needed a bit of a holiday in order to prepare itself for the party-highlight of the Germany calender: Karneval.
Yes, Karneval. Commencing at 11.11 on the Thursday before the start of Lent, it lasts until the wee hours of Tuesday morning, with everybody wearing crazy costumes and boozing considerably throughout. Each day has a different significance, with the most important being the Thursday, Wieberfastnacht (which has something to do with female empowerment and means women can chop off men's ties and kiss whoever they want) and Rosenmontag (which features great big parades of thousands of people in all the major cities with floats and throwing goodies to the crowds). In NRW, the best place to go to party is definitely Cologne, although having sampled Düsseldorf I can tell you that that's pretty damn awesome as well. This is my Karneval story...
Thursday: Due to having to work until 3pm on Thursday I was unable to attend the big celebration kick-off. However, I raced over to Kelsey's after work to transform myself into a parrot*** and we managed to make it to Cologne for around 7. We even made sure we caught the others up on the train, snaffling on a couple of bottles of (awful) wine and playing the best (or most stupid) drinking game even invented: Drink Whenever You See Somebody In A Costume. We then found Kate and Lara somewhere around Clodwigplatz and proceeded to have a good ol' party. And it really was lots of fun for a while. A generous man kept buying all four of us drinks, Lara found a tambourine, we drew face-paint flags on each other and we sang riotously to the German Karneval tunes. When Kate and Lara, who after all had been on it far longer than Kelsey and myself decided to head home, we kept the party going, following two blokes dressed as pigs to some scrappy little club in Barbarossaplatz. Fun was still being had. In fact, fun was had right up until around 2.30am, whereupon fun very rapidly stopped being had because I discovered the absence of my purse; it had been stolen out of my bag. The rest of the night was given over to a trip to the police station, my hysterical tears and a prolonged sit in McDonalds until we could get the first train home on Friday morning. I got home at 7am, showered and went straight out again to the bank to cancel my cards and generally fix my life. I think I finally got to bed at bout 11.30am, after having been up for 26 hours.
Saturday: Saturday was Düsseldorf day. Well, night, really as we didn't get there until gone 9pm. I'm in love with Düsseldorf Altstadt normally, but that night it was magical. They'd rigged up a speaker system all down the main streets playing out a truly eclectic mix of tunes (The Killers, Status Quo, Viva Colonia, Whitney Huston...) and there were stalls every few meters supplying all your Karneval needs, from funny hats to beer, from Kanye sunglasses to "Karneval Kocktail". The atmosphere was infectious. We hit out favourite Irish pub before partying in the streets and then headed to Ratingerstrasse to dance the rest of the night away in Goldener Einhorn, where we met some true legends, baffled at the fact that "When A Child Is Born" is apparently a party tune in this country, and I stole a builder's hat.
Monday: 22 whole hours of party time. Everything commenced at 8.42 when, armed with a bottle of wine and dressed like twats, we grabbed the 8.42 to Cologne. We stocked up with more beer on arrival and, avoiding the attentions of an extremely pissed bloke dressed as pink bunny rabbit, we headed off to the... well, we headed off somewhere and found ourselves a good spot to watch the parade. By this time, however, I was experiencing a call of nature and all the toilets seemed to be some kind of VIP only affair. So, Kelsey, master of crime, busted me into a locked set using her own house key. Amazing. Until, that is, we got shouted at and had to run away (fortunately, I'd already made use of the facilities, so this wasn't too much of a problem). The parade itself was crackers; hours and hours of people and floats trooping by, pelting the baying crowds with biscuits, chocolate and sweeties. As Ally was dressed as a racial-stereotype Mexican, we used his hat as a container and got down to some dirty fighting in a quest to amass as much Haribo as we could. We were so good we decided to form a band of Superhero crime fighters called the "Süssigkeiten Ninjas, and then pigged out on all our spoils until we felt sick.
The only way to combat the excess of chocolate was Bratwurst and beer, which is what we did. The next few hours were a mixture of singing loudly to German anthems, pratting about in a shopping trolley in front of the Cologne Cathedral and showcasing dance moves from Jersey Shore. By 11.30 we were getting bored of staying down by the river and headed off to another part of town, eventually ending up in the same place I had been on Thursday when I got robbed. However, far from resenting that crappy little bar, I'm actually a little bit in love with it. They played some banging records (including "Torn" by Natalie Imbruglia, allowing Ally and myself to whack out the David Armand dance routine) and I'm sure I danced solidly and with gutso for at least three hours. Around 3am we decided it would be an idea to hit the road but then accidentally found ourselves in another bar, dancing around behind the full length glass windows and waving to the people outside. I'm not quite sure how this happened, and as Kate pointed out, we must have looked just like prostitutes in Amsterdam, prostitutes in Amsterdam dressed as red indians, cave girls or parrots. We ended up eventually leaving around 5 and getting back to Duisburg around 6.30 on Tuesday morning, staggering blearily through the crowds of commuters now on the their way work. A terrible sight indeed. I fell in my front door at seven and crashed out till lunch, when I got up again, washed the gunk from my face and hair and headed over to Carol's for hangover pancakes**** and to say bye to Lara, whose sadly now left us for the sunnier climes of Madrid. Personally, I'd have chosen Duisburg myself.
I loved Karneval, but I've been glad of the few days normality that have followed it's dramatic climax. I'm not sure I could have handled another weekend quite like that one, though it was brilliant to watch this normally conservative region well and truly let its hair down. It was an unforgettable experience to say the very least!
And that, folks, is the cumulation of my most recent drunken escapades. I'm sure there will be new ones to add to the record very soon. There always are. However, with my next post I promise you something a little more civilised and so, as always, stay tuned.
*It's ALWAYS the Nuwang. For those of you that don't know, it's a cheep pear-favoured wine coloured nuclear-green. At 10% volume, you'd wonder how it manages to do such terrible things to people, but it does.
** I still have it. It's on my desk right now. You know when you wake up alongside a tambourine that it's been a good night.
*** I made my own costume and it was pretty damn amazing, even if I do say so myself.
**** It was Pancake Day back home after all. The Germans don't celebrate Pancake Day, the poor bastards. The again, they have Karneval, so swings and roundabouts, I guess.
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