We got up at 1.30am. We did make a thermos of tea (although we had been planning on a thermos of glühwein, but as it turns out "buy the cheapest wine you can find" is not a wise first step. Being the seasoned expert that I now am, I would advise paying more than $1.95 a litre). We got onto a train, and I did my best to fall asleep, but sadly failed.
We went to Basel for the beginning of Fasnacht. Inconveniently, the beginning of Fasnacht is at 4am, and so there we were, huddled together with thousands of other people in the centre of Basel, yawning, eating bratwurst and hoping not to be rained on. At precisely 4am all the lights went off and everyone went "oooh!" and then it all began.
I didn't really know what to expect. Reto had explained it all to me a bit, but somehow I never really listened properly, and I had tried to read about it on the internet but that never really sank in either. I knew that what we were going for was a parade of people playing piccolos and drums and dressed up in wacky costumes, and someone had told me that it was really loud, but that was about it.
Anyway, at the click of 4am ("click" being the sound of the lights being turned off, I imagine) we were suddenly surrounded by the sound of piccolos and drums, and all these people who were standing opposite me suddenly flung themselves to the side. Not some strange sort of audience participation, as it turned out, but the paraders making space for their parade. That was kind of unexpected, because there were clear paths left everywhere that I assumed the paraders would follow, and this being Switzerland, I imagined that no one was standing where they shouldn't be. Apparently some people were, though, but not to worry, because they were flung efficiently aside by a bunch of people dressed in wacky masks and costumes, with lights on their heads and carrying paper lanterns of all shapes and sizes.
The lanterns were not really lanterns, I suppose, but big illuminated things that were decorated by each group (for the paraders travel in packs) and apparently made fun of local politics and the like. It seems, for example, that it was proposed that a "polarium" be built in Basel and that it be packed full of penguins. Apparently this was a popular plan, but it was abandoned for financial reasons, and so pictures of sad penguins abounded.
In order to actually understand what it was all about I'm sure that you'd have to be a local, or at least a person with a far better grasp of their bizarro spelling than I am, but even with my total absence of knowledge it was still pretty entertaining, and spectacular to see in the 4am darkness.
Anyway. Each group of paraders played their own tune with their piccolos and drums, and had their own themed lanterns and paraded around in an orderly (ish) fashion. After a while it got kind of cold, so Reto and I went into a cafe for a bowl of soup and some warm air. As it turns out, groups of paraders apparently decide that they want to have breaks whenever they want to too, and so stepping indoors was kind of like stepping into a hell populated by freakish dismembered heads (and drums).
By the time we had had our soup and gone back outside the whole tone of the thing had kind of changed. It was all a lot more disorganised. The parade had spread out, it seemed, and groups of paraders were no longer following other groups. One minute you (as a bystander) would be standing in the street watching paraders parade by, and the next minute you would be either mown down or flung aside by a group of paraders who decided that they liked the look of your piece of road and weren't going to let you stand in their way. It was impossible to move, really because you never knew when some troop of ghouls and crazies would leap out at you with their piccolos blaring (all of which made rendezvousing with my recently-Australianised friend Ingrid impossible, which was a pity for various reasons, not the least of which was that I was going to get her to sign my postal vote form for me).
Anyway, that's basically Fasnacht for you. Or at least the first bit, for this goes on for three days in various forms. It's loud and cold and a surprising combination of heavily organised (you have to be one of them to be in it, and you stick with your group's rules about costumes and subjects and tunes and so on) and heavily disorganised (you stop when you want to, you go where you want to, you wake up the neighbours at unreasonable hours, which I gather is as un-Swiss as throwing rubbish (or confetti) in the streets, which is also done with abandon during Fasnacht). I had an excellent time, though, and then, tragically (to get back to the old-age-pensioner/thermos-carrying theme) I also really enjoyed going home again and having a nice warm bath and a nap. Sigh.
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