Carnival of Cultures

Or, for you German speakers out there, Schadenfreude und Fremdscham. This carnival is part street festival (like a very diverse state fair with no admissions price) and part parade. I'm not really that into parades, but I went anyways. It was a spectacle of...culture, I guess. And of closet exhibitionists, if there is such a thing. Many of the groups were representing ethnic groups in Berlin, and got all dressed up in traditional costumes and played traditional music. One downside of this was that apparently some ethnic groups are traditionally louder/faster/more lively than others, so some groups (like the Peruvians with their quiet pan pipes) were very overshadowed by others (the Brazilians with lots and lots of drums). Weirdly, there didn't seem to be any Scandinavian groups participating....
It was also kind of hard to tell with some groups, especially the ones that seemed to represent how bored housewives spend their time in Berlin rather than the culture of particular ethnic groups. (Daughters of the Desert, for example, was actually not a bunch of belly-dancing Persian women recently liberated from a harem, but a mostly bunch of German women with jingly coin belts and too much eyeliner who spend their Wednesday evenings finding themselves while wiggling to "world beats" in a dance studio in Steglitz.) The confused looking little boy in the picture to the left kept asking performers what they were supposed to be, which, though a little embarassing, helped me too.
Some of the groups seemed to just want an excuse to dress oddly and march through the streets. There was one group of teenagers that dressed in tinfoil and bubblewrap, painted their
faces, and danced with umbrellas, barefoot or in bubblewrap frog feet, to the longest electric guitar riff ever. Later, I found out that this was a group of Berlin's socially active youth, who had chosen the theme "Cloudbreak" for the parade. Apparently they were protesting global warming or something....
The whole thing was completely impressive/grotesque/brilliant/ bizarre. Parades are fascinating to begin with (why do people participate, why do people watch, why do the parades move instead of the people, who is staring at whom?), but I haven't seen many displays like this before, and certainly never anything on this scale. Of course, the best part was the street festival. There were market stalls selling ostensibly ethnic crafts (cheap jewelry, scarves, wooden stuff, t-shirts, water pipes, umbrellas, etc.) and there were market stalls selling all kinds of ethnic food. And, obviously, there were market stalls selling (ethnic) beer and cocktails. There were also several stages set up for different (ethnic) bands. Basically the perfect setting for excess, but eating the food and dancing to the music was definitely much more fun than standing in the rain and watching other people do it.