Basler Fasnacht 2009

We can now say that we survived our first Fasnacht! Some visuals may haunt us, and we will likely be finding confetti around the apartment months from now, but it was a great experience that has made Basel all the more interesting!

Basler Fasnacht is a huge Lenten carnival that takes place annually, starting on the Monday after Ash Wednesday at 4:00am and ending 72 hours later. During those three days, the city is transformed by uncharacteristically boisterous Baslers sporting creepy looking costumes.

The festivities begin with Morgestraich at 4:00am on Monday morning. All of the lights in the city center are extinguished and over one hundred "cliques" of men and women with lanterns march through the streets to drum and piccolo music. Many restaurants and bars stay open throughout the celebration, offering traditional specialties like flour soup and onion pie. Ben attended Morgestraich with some friends and describes the event as "a dialed-up Philadelphia Mummers parade with no lights and a definite creep-factor."

The carnival continues into the day, and most businesses throughout the city are closed. The daytime celebrations are a little more kid-friendly, despite the masks (called Larve) being everywhere you turn--on the trams, standing outside cafes and walking down the streets. There are parades (called the Cortege) on Monday and Wednesday afternoon where the cliques are joined by floats, marching bands, singers and Schyssdräggziigli--small unaffiliated groups who wander through the streets in costume, sneaking up on bystanders and attacking them with confetti. The city's Fasnachts-Comité sells badges that you can buy to support the carnival and supposedly save yourself from a confetti attack, but we had badges and they didn't seem to help us out at all! (And rainy weather ensured that all of the confetti made it back home with us!)

While the kids had fun collecting oranges, candy and flowers being thrown from the floats, it would have been great to have better understood some of the messages, or "sujets", being presented by the various groups. Supposedly the sujets often refer to current events, are often political and are usually sarcastic (see the very interesting Obama picture included). The messages are either obvious from the costumes, or sometimes the groups hand out flyers with ironic verses (in local dialect...).

They have a Children's Cortege on Tuesday where groups of children can dress up and march throughout the city. Eli and Ethan joined other children of women in the American Women’s Club to march as the Fasnacht Flugzeuge (a fleet of airplanes). Eli didn't really get the concept of giving out candy; he just took candy from all of his friends and ate it. But both boys had a blast wearing their costumes and throwing confetti at each other!

While slighly exhausting, it was a fun few days. But if we stick around town to experience it all again next year, it won't be as spectators. Ben is already scouting out the local kellers in search of a clique that might take him in. And if he grows that mustache again, he won't even need a mask! ;)
Just kidding! xoxo