Last weekend was carneval, or as they say in Cologne: Fasteleer. We were there, as every year, and it was fun, as every year. But it wasn’t as busy as other years: maybe because of the time of year, too soon after Christmas, or maybe because so many people have the flu.
Our little bunch was one short: Henk was ill in bed, in Amsterdam, with a bad flu. While we (Frits, Niels, Thomas, Jan en Timon) were in Cologne, with a spare costume…
After a lot of phoning and asking around, we found Mario who didn’t mind helping us out. The problem was that we needed to be six, as we had costumes in the six colours of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. And Mario had to ‘fill in’ the yellow costume.
And even though we got a lot of compliments, we didn’t win any prizes – but then we’re used to that.
The costume ball of the Rosa Funken was as busy as ever, but a large part were ‘curious’ rather than ‘gay’: people who had heard that the Rosa Funken Ball was always such fun, and who had come to see what is was about. What they didn’t get, was that the idea is to come in an inventive, and possibly outreagous, costume. Something off-the-peg from the Kaufhof or Karstadt simply doesn’t cut it for this crowd. So we were not too impressed with the costumes.
But there were some good costumes: Josephine and GeraldineDaphne were great, we loved Audrey Hepburn: but they (like us) were not appropriate to the theme, which was ‘Pirates of the Seven Seas’, and so did not get to the stage, let alone a prize.
I’m just hoping that next year it’ll be more of a ‘Gay Ball’.

See more pictures here: carneval 2005