Subject: Basel
Hi everyone!
I told you about Luzern already. I just went to the Fasnacht celebration in Basel yesterday, so now I can make a bit of a comparison. The celebration in Basel begins with "Morgestraich" (I think that's what it's called) at 4am! It is apparently a really big deal, as there are special trains that leave Zürich at 2 in the morning so people can get to Basel in time to stand around and freeze their butts off for an hour before the festivities begin! I couldn't get a hold of anyone- I think all my friends are away either on vacation or home, right now- so I didn't go for Morgestraich. I didn't want to be there in the middle of the night with noone I knew! I think that was a good choice, too, bc as I was going to sleep at around 1:30 the wind was howling like crazy, and the rain/snow was beating against my window, and
there was actually thunder and lightning!!! uhhh, not my kind of night to be standing around outside!
Anyway, I showed up in Basel in the early afternoon, in time to see most of the parade! (Well, I don't know when it started, exactly, but it continued until about 6:30 or so!!) regardless, I got to see several hours of parade! This thing was HUGE!
Like in Luzern, each group had a number. I don't remember how many there were in Luzern, but there couldn't have been more than 30 or 40 or so. Here I saw one float
carrying the number 106!!!! And this one didn't follow one continuous route- at every corner there were police controlling the route with gates- one group to the left, one to the right, etc.- so that it was constantly splitting and reforming all around the city! Which meant that no matter where you stood, you'd get to see something! I walked around a lot, just to see where it all was going, and what else there was.
In Luzern most of the crowd was wearing costumes, too. In Basel people were much more like spectators. Only a few little kids and the people in the parade itself were wearing costumes.
But the people on the floats threw a lot of stuff out to/at the crowd- I came home with about 5 or 6 oranges, tons of candy, a few yellow flowers, and so much confetti! I was belted with it a few times. At one point I was
following along the parade route, and one of the guys on a float started throwing pieces of candy towards me. I caught 3 pieces, but with the 4th I dropped the first 3. Then he started waving a yellow rose at me, like he was going to throw it, too. Then he started waving me closer, so he could hand it to me. He started yelling something to me, but I couldn't understand it, through all the music and noise, and the fact that it was in Baseldüütsch. So I followed along, started to grab the rose, then BAM! He threw a TON of black confetti at me! Some of it landed in my mouth, and it took me forever to spit it out- bleh!! And some went down my jacket, and must have gone down my shirt, too, because when I got home and got changed it all fell out and left a huge pile of confetti on my bed and floor! (I think I'll have confetti floating around for a while- a piece just fell out of my jacket next to the computer!) It was really, funny, though and I started to laugh- I had seen them do the same thing to 3 or 4 people already, and I was stupid enough to fall for the same trick!
And at the end of the whole thing, if the floats still have stuff to throw, they throw it out to the crowds that gather around them. And these crowds are huge, too! At one point I was there in the middle of so many people screaming "WAAGIS! WAAGIS!" (Wagen (wagon), I think or float) trying to get them to throw more stuff. And the people on the floats really live it up, too, prolonging it as long as possible, taunting the crowd with stuff, trying to get them to scream louder. Then suddenly they throw huge handfuls of candy, and everyone goes scrambling to catch it in the air, then to pick up all the stuff that fell to the ground.
The music was a bit different here, too.
In Luzern there were mostly all-brass groups, with big strong sounds, but really funny percussion, kind of like quads of hollow boxes, (along with the snares and bass drums, etc), so it had an almost cartoonish sound. In Basel it was mostly fife and drum, that also had a comical, tinny sound, but I'm not sure if some of them were out of tune intentionally to make it sound funny, or if it was just because they were piccolos, and so many of them!
But alongside every band were people handing out brightly colored strips of paper. I collected a bunch of these, too.
They were big long funny poems talking about the theme of that group, but all written in dialect. So I could catch the main idea of some of them, but I'm going to have to get a friend to help me read them! What else? Oh, there were MOUNDS of confetti everywhere, of all different colors! There were some little kids just playing with the confetti on the ground like they would with leaves or snow. Like I said, I have my own collection of the stuff, that followed me home. (You should have seen how much of it I pulled out of my pockets and my hood!...and my hair!)
So that's Basel Fasnacht. Pretty cool- I think it's the better of the two if you're going to get stuff from the floats, but overall I think I liked Luzern better. ....but then someday I'll have to go to Morgestraich so I can really make a good, fair comparison!
Talk to you soon!
Love,
Cor :)
A couple of things I'd learned since returning from Basel:
1. Luzern is a Catholic city, and celebrates Fasnacht just before the start of Lent. Basel is a Protestant city. Back when this difference was a big deal (during the Reformation, perhaps?) Basel decided to push back their Fasnacht celebration to one week later, after Lent had started. This was a deliberate taunt to Luzern.
2. The Fasnacht celebrations are funded through the purchase of buttons, similar to what we do for First Night. I didn't realize this at the time. When the guy on the float was waving me closer and yelling something to me, he was trying to see if I was wearing one of these buttons. Since I wasn't, meaning I didn't contribute, he threw confetti at me instead of a treat!
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