Germany, the land of efficiency and railroad suicides

I've finally made it to Germany, where lines are short, time is valuable and pedestrians have the right of way. After leaving the coast of Northwestern Italy, where I spent five days sunning myself on the rocky beach with my friend Leslie, I was in Interlaken, Switzerland for a night of drinks and dancing at a wild hostel. Mad props to Chris, the Scot who helped me get there.

After Interlaken, I headed to Zurich, where I accompanied my new pal Jason to the Street Parade. Street Parade is a festival in the citycenter with 800,ooo people in attendance. Five stages were set up at various points around the river, each playing techno/house/drum and bass/club music, mixed by some of the best DJs in the world. 30 parade floats also playing hard-thumping music followed the parade route. If someone had dropped a bomb in Zurich that day, most, if not all of the world's Eurotrash would have been eliminated.

I have never danced so much in my life, nor have I ever seen so many mohawks, faux-hawks and acid-washed jeans. Think 12 hours straight of dancing, wild costumes, drinking and drug-induced stupors (not mine, of course :). I should have worn earplugs.

We showed up around 1pm, and the Street Parade was already in full swing. People of all ages were out, breaking it down even through the rainshowers that dotted the afternoon sky. I saw some of the best dancing in my life, and by midnight I could barely move, my legs were so sore. At one point in the afternoon, we entered a head shop. After browsing around for a few minutes, we left. A few minutes later, Jason discovered that he had left the store with a baseball cap in his hand...not his baseball cap, rather one he had been looking at in the store. We were quite a way from the store by that point, so just decided to keep going. Later, I wore the cap, which bore the label 'Boehseonkelz', which means 'Evil uncles' in German. I wore that cap for the next two days as well, and at the end of the second day, I was on my way to a hostel in Stuttgart with a German who was heading in the same direction. The German guy asked me if I liked the group Boehseonkelz, and I told him the story of how Jason inadvertently stole the hat, and that I had no idea what kind of music they played. He then told me that it was a rock group known for being Neo-Nazis. Great. Just great.

Anyway, my biggest surprise about the Street Parade was that it ended at midnight. All of the stages closed down, the music stopped, and cleanup crews began their difficult task. The streets were still filled with music-hungry revellers searching for any beat they could find. We were able to find a few bars still blasting music til the wee hours and continue dancing, but by four I had to find somewhere to sleep. Of course all of the hotels were booked, so we just followed the crowd to the train station, where almost every spare inch of wallspace was occupied by passed-out partiers. We had to walk around for several minutes to find a spot to crash. I cannot say how awesome the Zurich police are for leaving us and the thousands of other partiers with poor planning skills and no hotel reservations alone that morning in the train station, able to recover in peace.

The amazing thing is that by noon the next morning, everything was spotless throughout Zurich. Those people really know how to remove trash and beer/vomit stench like nobody's business.

After Zurich, on my parents' recommendation, I headed to Konstanz, a city on the Bodensee between Germany and Switzerland. Apparently I wasn't the only one with that idea, because every hostel there was booked. So I got a ticket to Stuttgart, with a stop in Singen, where I was to change trains. The train from Singen was supposed to leave minutes after I arrived there from Konstanz, so I had to sprint to its platform with seconds to spare. As it turned out, though, someone had committed suicide on the train tracks somewhere up ahead, and the train had to sit for 3 hours while they cleared the tracks. Uschi, the woman I'm staying with in Heilbronn, Germany, told me this happens a lot here.