Karneval!!!

So for those of you who don't know Karneval is a festival held in many cities across Europe as a celebration of spring. However my small city of Aalborg does it bigger and better than anywhere in Northern Europe. In fact the Karneval in Copenhagen and even in London pale in comparison to the one in small little Aalborg. Over 100,000 people flock to a city of about 120,000 to take part in the festivities so it is a pretty big deal.

So what it is exactly? Well imagine the wildest and craziest Halloween party you have ever been to or seen on TV. Then add in all of your friends and over 125,000 other people and it goes all day long from 10:00 when the parade starts until people are passed out from drinking when ever that happens but long into the night and really the next day. The entire city is shut down and the streets are filled with people in costumes carting around little carts full of beer etc. The festivities began around 7:00 am when people start to wake up, eat their only real meal of the day and put on their costumes...

Most people start drinking early in the morning and have stocked up enough that they can keep going all day long and into the night. There are floats and bands playing live music and trucks with speakers playing other music. And everyone starts at a place called NordKraft and walk through the city and end up at a park. At the park there is a area that you can enter for  a small fee of 100kr ($20) where they have more live music and food and drinks for sale.

It was one of the craziest things I have ever seen the streets were completely packed with people, a surprising number from the UK, I guess it is really popular for them to come to Aalborg since it better then the one in London... Everyone was in costumes and some of them were very elaborate, and many times there were groups of people that had a theme of sorts. The theme of this years Karneval was called Sex Zoological, I do not know what that means but most people dressed up as some type of animal... It is what I imagine Mardi Gras in New Orleans to be like but instead of it being warm and sunny it was unfortunately cool and misting rain all day. However that did nothing to kill the mood and every had an awesome time. Most people I knew returned home from exhaustion in the evening but a few strong soles stayed downtown until night time.  Below are some pictures that try to capture the madness...

Waiting at NordKraft for the parade to start, only a few people participated this year...

Yep the buses tried to get as far as they could but the gave up and were shortly overwhelmed my throngs of drunk people who not surprisingly found it a great idea to be on top of them. I will note that the driver is still in this bus at the time... As for a police presence to end the fun, non-existent, pretty much they just let everything go as long as it is not too wild.

One of many group costumes that were quite impressive, this one is obviously a caterpillar

Down by the Fjord is where we began to encounter the floats, you can see some in the background above the heads of the people

On of the live bands on the back of a truck, they were actually a very good rock/ alternative rock band...

On the main street of Aalborg it was craziness...

The very last float arrived at the end around 3:30 considering they only had to travel 1 maybe 2 km from the start it was impressive the achieve such a task in 5 1/2 hours...

All in all it was an awesome day....