You're a Faschingskrapferl

Today is Faschingsdienstag, known to the rest of the world as Carnival or Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday or whatever the Chinese name for it is. For some reason this is sort of a non-entity of a holiday in the U.S., unless you live in New Orleans, where's it's just a disgusting entity. In Europe, it is the Thing. It's Halloween and Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve all rolled up in one.

Stegersbach had a parade this afternoon. It was kind of the worst parade I'd ever seen, which made it, of course, the best parade I'd ever seen. There were (I'm not exaggera8ging here, as M2 would say) ten floats, and all of them looked like they had been thrown together by drunken gnomes. These same gnomes were evidently driving them, because it was the slowest, most confused bit of float coordination imaginable. At one point the road was divided by a little island/lane marker thing, and of course half the floats went around on the left and half went around on the right, and then they couldn't get back in a straight line again and everything was stalled for half an hour.

However, this general idiocy was compensated for by the insane number of people running around in elaborate costumes, both in the parade and as bystanders. Best part, though? You know how in American parades they throw candy to the kids? Yeah, in this parade they were handing out liquor to the adults.