See ya next year, Kiel Week!

Another successful Kiel Week has just wrapped up.

A performer makes his wobbly way across a 100 foot slack line. People paid 1 euro to throw a water balloon at him. Until I realized he was only acting like he was in a precarious state, I was mad at the hurlers and very stressed.

For some reason, the Kiel Tourism board describes Kiel Week as one of the world's largest regattas. I don't know one person who travels to Kiel for the boats. Of course, I don't know anyone who sails but I know a lot of people who enjoy music, food, dance and theater from around the world and flock to Kiel each year at the end of June.

A performer on break from German slap dancing. I was told these calf warmers make a difference.

Over ten days, three million people flocked to the the city that normally holds 270,000. People outside and inside German come to celebrate Kiel Week. Everyone in town is in a great mood.

It is like Christmas to me. There is a mental countdown to the event, then excitement during its observance, and then a feeling of sadness when it ends and you think of the fun that just ended. I have not visited Oktoberfest. I was scared away from it by native Germans. It is a few weeks of drinking very over-priced beer in extremely-crowded conditions. I don't need to pay a lot of money and travel for hours to drink beer. Cologne's Carneval attracts thousands of Germans. I am not sure why it is cool but Oktoberfest. Perhaps it is the costumes and beer prices that do not rise. I went to Carneval once and I was not impressed. It was a lot of standing in a costume and drinking beer. But Kiel Week is more than beer drinking.

The insanity of Kiel Week was heightened by its coincidence with the European Championship for soccer. Asmus and I live in the center of town. When Germany beat Greece last Sunday, we hit the Alter Markt, a public square at the top of our street, and dancing the night away with DJ Gary and an overflow crowd. It was a sea of white shirts emblazoned with schwarz, rot und gold -- black, red and gold, the colors of the German flag.

All that partying happened, despite the constant rain. During the first Friday, I sat in the rain and sipped wine from vendors representing Argentina, Spain and France. Asmus stuck to beer from "Denmark," better known as Carlsberg beer, and Cubra libre from "Mexico". The rain and the drinks followed dinner from France. During cocktails, Bob Geldolf played his and the Boomtown Rats' hits on a stage a few hundred feet away.

It is weird not to constantly having something available to do. For ten days, Kiel is like New York. Now it is back to being a nice northern German town, where everything shuts down at 7 and nothing is open on Sunday.

The crowd on the last night of Kiel Week at the waterfront. Surprise, surprise, there are storm clouds. The rain stopped right before the closing night fireworks.