By Jean-Baptiste Piggin Feb 13, 2007, 12:15 GMT
Hamburg - Woe betide the unsuspecting visitor who arrives in the German city of Cologne on Thursday, when the ladies of the city will be wearing skimpy fancy dress and issuing lip-smacking carnival kisses to all.
The Rhine Valley's carnival season is already in full swing and will climax next Monday with huge street parades including bands, clowns and papier-mache floats in Cologne and the cities of Dusseldorf and Mainz.
The celebrations in Cologne of Women's Day in the carnival season can be disconcerting for anyone unprepared, particularly men, as it will feature the time-honoured ritual of snipping off all men's neckties with large scissors.
Should any astonished male visitors from abroad be puzzled by this custom, giggling women will be explain to them in salacious detail, which item of male anatomy is being celebrated in this carnival tease.
By nightfall, the beer will be flowing fast as 50,000 of both sexes throng the tiny pubs and alleyways of Cologne's ancient heart.
The gratuitous violence and binge drinking that often mars festivities in English-speaking nations is rare in Germany. Wardens will be mostly concerned by people relieving themselves against the historic walls.
Last year, 444 men and 18 women unwilling to queue up at public toilets were instantly fined and the city fathers have this year more than doubled the fine for public urination to 35 euros (46 dollars).
'Public peeing has to hurt them in the wallet,' said Katja Nieters, a spokeswoman for the Cologne Office of Public Order.
Last summer's football World Cup introduced the world to images of merry Germans hugging, wearing face paint and dancing on the streets, but in the Catholic west and south of the country, that kind of festival has been an annual custom since time immemorial.
Carnival marks the last riotous weeks before the six-week Catholic season of Lent, when the faithful abstain from pleasures.
Fancy-dress vendors say this season's best-selling costumes are pirate suits, inspired by the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and tight little hospital-nurse tunics with short skirts for women.
Sarah Kuhn, 22, recently chose a butterfly costume at the Karnevalswierts store in Cologne. Despite the winter cold, she planned to leave her delicate arms and legs bare. 'I'm wearing this skimpy little tutu under it,' she explained.
Few feel cold in the overcrowded pubs, where recorded sing-along music overlays the din of talk and laughter.
A tight coterie of Cologne bands with dialect names such as Foeoess, Brings, Paveier and Hoehner dominates an annual competition to write rhythmic songs with lyrics which celebrate the revellers' affection for what they believe to be the merriest city on Earth.
The bands perform 200 to 250 concerts in the six weeks before carnival's climax and enjoy huge recordings sales.
This would not be Germany, if the 20 songs entered in the Loss Mer Singe competition were not all neatly listed with downloadable lyrics on a website, to be learned while sober. To vote on the best song, you must be present in one of the 24 official sing-along bars.
Strains of last year's winner, Hoehner's Viva Colonia, were heard worldwide last year when the crowds sang it at World Cup games.
Wolfgang Oelsner, 57, a Cologne psychologist, has spent years observing the German way with inhibitions at carnival balls and concerts as a trumpeter in a band. Along with the waiters, he is one of the few sober people in the room by the end of the night.
'You watch the ladies and gentlemen, very stiff in their pretty clothes at the start. Then they get chatty, and finally pretty far gone,' he said dispassionately in a Cologne newspaper, the Stadt- Anzeiger.
On February 19, carnival climaxes on Rosenmontag or Rose Monday. Big-city parades shower sweets onto the crowds in the streets from huge floats.
During, Cologne's parade, 150 tons of sweets and other curiosities are hurled onto the ground where the shrieking crowd scrambles for the biggest loot. Everyone comes armed with carrier bags and upturned umbrellas. So when in Cologne, do as the revellers do!
This year an ethical trade group, Jecke Fairsuchung, is campaigning against inhumane labour conditions in the sweet factories and has persuaded a main parade group, the Rote Funken, to buy 1.3 tons of 'fair trade' snacks to be scattered.
The mango-flavoured winegum sweets and fried manioc chips were mainly packed in the Philippines. Fairsuchung president Ulrike Thoenniges said she hoped by 2012 to supply 15 tons of ethically manufactured sweets.
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