Local Fest

My village held it's annual weekend fest....the Apfelblutenfest.  It typically runs three days and is the chief source of income for the various 'clubs' in the village.....where wine, beer, and food items are sold.

 The highlight of the weekend deal is the Sunday parade, which takes about twenty minutes to run through a dozen floats, a couple of marching bands, and some oddball vehicles.

The vehicle to the right?  A tractor-like vehicle, with all the hydraulics necessary to a apple-squeezer out in some orchard, and the juice gets thrown into a plastic container later to ferment.  Most all of the apple wine served over the weekend.....was a home-made variation, which the locals ferment by thousands of gallons.

The parade?  It's a fairly weird group.  Some historical characters.....some Harry Potter witches....some freaky hooker-like gals....etc.

One part of the weekend is the choosing of the "Queen"....which is typically some 17-year-old teenage gal from the village who appears in front of some committee.....answers some questions....and gets the life-long tag of 'Apple-Queen' for the village.  I imagine it helps on the life resume, and some guy will really be pumped up when he dates this gal later and realizes that she was once some Apple-Queen winner.

This year was a bit of a odd episode because you rarely have three days in May of nice sunny weather.  To be honest, over the last twenty odd years that I've been around this fest....you typically have rainy weather or fairly chilled weather for at least one single day out of the fest weekend.

In this case?  We've had five days straight now of sunny weather (no clouds) and temperatures have been mid-70's (25C) every single day.

All of this led to a large showing of people.....even from Wiesbaden itself.

So I got up on Saturday morning to make the bakery run, and viewed the various booze bottles left over by the teenies enjoying the fest evening of the night before.  Typically, you have to be 18 years old to get real booze....but from 16 on.....you can buy beer or wine.   I probably counted twenty hard booze bottles (the big and economical vodka or whiskey type)

It's one of those trends.  From twenty years ago....most teens would have been satisfied to drink beer or wine.  That's no longer the case.  All of this explains why the village has a couple of cops and private security guys hanging around now during the fest (both daylight and evening hours).

From an American prospective, it's an interesting experience, with a few twists and different outcomes than you'd expect.