The crazy's were out in force last Saturday. Berlin's 13th annual mega-rave, Loveparade, was held in the Tiergarten around the Victory column three days ago. Unoffical totals put this loveparade (motto: "access peace") far smaller than previous ones, drawing only about 750,000 people. They think the totals were down because of terrorist scares after last year's WTC Bombings. Nonetheless, there were still a lot of people, dancing in the streets (and passing out in the streets). It takes a lot of alcohol to get 750,000 people drunk, but they had enough on sale.

Nonetheless, the masses were still out and about. Mary called it "a pride parade on crack." With all the spikes and mohawks, it wouldn't surprise me if there was a literal ton or two of hairgel in the crowd. There were yellow police jackets and shiny raver pants and fluffy leg warmers... they had everything. Last year when Mary came before it was really hot, so there were a more naked people too, but this year (the shame!) people kept their clothes on.

The clothing was so bad that the emergency personel couldn't just wear shiny jackets to distinguish themselves from neon-colored crowd. Instead, they wore shiny pants (the color depended on their job, red was for the health tents and blue for the garbage pickup crews) that had two white horizontal bands at the cuffs of the pants. They were easy to see, as long as they weren't in a crowd.

Even though Mary and I didn't partake in all the chemicals (favorites tended to be ecstasy, and redbull mixed with vodka) we still enjoyed ourselves. We got on the bus, which took us down the same road that the original love parade went down thirteen years ago, so we got to see all the fashions from the comfort of our seats, and then got off and started walking when the bus couldn't go any farther. We were still two miles from the center of the parade, but it was already seething with people. It didn't get really packed, like at a concert, almost until the center of the park, but I'm told that last year it was absolutely full all the way out until the Brandenburg Gate.

As we passed the gate, we took a quick stop to look at the circle of "Buddy Bears," like Chicago's cows, one bear from each country. All of them were beautifully done, and some were pretty telling. The Croation bear was painted all white but looked like it had shallow bullet holes all over it's pre-fab body. The Irish bear was painted all white and had green, orange and white netting all around it, showing how North Ireland was tied up by the United Kingdom.

We took a break (after walking halfway to the column when things starting getting crowded on the street) by going into the forest and sitting near a pond. The three closest groups to us were all smoking (the nearest group had a really cool water-bong), but we just sat and talked about what we thought of the parade and threw sticks and rocks into the pond and watched the ripples. I layed down and watched the people around me float by.

There were very few Americans, most of the people were Germans. I only heard two english speaking groups in the entire throbing mass. Apparently, there were about sixty "special trains" which brought people in from all the major cities around Germany: Frankfurt and Hambug Stuttgard and anywhere else...

The age ranges were pretty varied. There were some young kids, no more than six or seven, who were brought by their parents (which I personally think is Insane, but hey). They were almost always decked out in sunflowers and facepaint, and were actually kind of a cute addition to the otherwise Soddam&Gommorah-esque parade. The youngest people who came themselves were about twelve to fifteen, and almost all of them were young girls (Prostitots, as Alec so lovingly refers to them). They were wearing skimpy clothing, many with those see-through plastic bra straps, when some of them really didn't need to be wearing bras. I saw one boy from this age group, walking all by himself, but besides him they were ALL girls. There were surpisingly few people sixteen to twenty. I saw a few groups and couples, but the majority of the people were in their tweenties. While almost all of the prostitots were dressed outrageously, the tweenties group was more varied. there were some people, like Mary and I, who were just in pants and t-shirts, but there were also some people who had just gone crazy with costumes and were wearing helmets and flashlights and any kind of raver accessory you could imagine. There were a few people over thirty, who agian were almost uniformly dressed crazy.

My favorite peoples were the six-foot-six guy in a red diaper (or as Mary so lovingly refers to them, coochie-cutters) and a superman cape and the fifty year old in the shiny latex renaissance dress, with the fluffy butt and the frilly sleeves and the little round cap, who had his ten year old son-or-daughter in tow. People kept asking him directions, but I think it was just because they wanted to talk to him. He was actually really nice.

We eventually stood up and waded our way into the center of the crowd, thirty feet away from the victory column. It was a little hard to deal with, unless you were really enjoying the music or stone-faced drunk, and we were neither, so we started walking back home. We had had our fun, it was time to relax and have our own private little loveparade.

We got home and took a quick nap, then went to the park across the street. They were throwing a little mini-loveparade celebration in the bandshell, and there were probably four hundred people dancing and sitting on the grass, with picnic baskets full of liquor. It felt like a techno Ravinia, or a techno 4th of July celebration on the lawn at Gilson Beach, but with more chemicals. It would have been really pleasant, especially if we had known the people, but we didn't, and we were tired, so we just meandered home. We stopped along the way to get some ice cream from the local icecream guy, and by accident got one scoop of mango and one scoop of chocolate on the same cone, but they tasted good together so we didn't mind.