More than 1 million Germans jammed the streets of Rhine valley cities Monday to view carnival parades and to be showered with sweets in a traditional attempt to dispel winter woes. The biggest of the parades, in Cologne, featured 150 elaborate floats and 11,500 performers and marching bands.
Masters of ceremonies on some of the floats had lockers stuffed with hundreds of kilograms of chocolates, roses and baubles to scatter to an estimated 1 million cheering, dancing people ignoring the chill and drizzling rain.
While thickly dressed children scrambled at knee height on sidewalks for the lollies, adults craned to peer over shoulders at the political humour of the paper-mache effigies on many of the floats.
Organisers imposed some changes earlier when the volunteer designers of floats became too crude. One Cologne float had been set to show an effigy of Chancellor Angela Merkel topless and waiting for cosmetic surgery. Parts of the body of the effigy were marked with political issues which she would like to shed.
The Cologne parade chief ordered a brassiere would be painted on the figure to avoid giving offence. But a few kilometres away in Dusseldorf, a similar parade went ahead with a float which depicted Merkel as a she-wolf, naked and on all fours, giving milk to a demanding nation. In the city of Mainz, a third parade drew an estimated crowd of 500,000. Carnival is a last burst of excess before Catholics begin the six-week fasting season of Lent, which begins on Wednesday this week.
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