Date: July 25, 2015
Place: Berlin, Germany
Day 2 of my 25 day Euro Tour. This is Story #5 (of my 100 Stories published goal by July 2016).
It's my second day in Berlin, and I spend the first half of it walking around the city with my friend who lives here. Around 3pm we end up at an outdoor bar/lounge next to the river. We eat, we drink, we talk, we laugh, and time passes by.
Then around 6pm, we hear a noise.
More like a loud sound.
Even more like an array of loudspeakers blasting techno music.
Sound travels faster over water, so it is hard to ignore the music. We step out of the bar, and the view before my eyes is majestic.
There are trucks driving through the streets, with a different DJ on each truck. Thousands of people surround each truck as it slowly makes it's way along the Berlin wall to some destination. We join the parade near the latter half of it, and as far as my eyes can see, I only see people. Dancing.
Welcome to the Love Parade, an electronic music festival started in Germany over 25 years ago.
As we travel with the herds of dancing individuals, I have to regularly side-step countless broken bottles of alcohol. Street drinking is apparently legal in Berlin. The sun doesn't go down till 9pm, and that is how long this party goes. It started around 12pm, and some of these people have been dancing since the beginning.
As we make our way to the front of the parade, a couple hours pass by. In that time, I learn more about this parade, and how it hadn't happened in over 5 years. Turns out the last parade, in 2010, turned into a stampede due to overcrowding, and 21 people died. That parade reported had anywhere between 200,000 to 1.4 Million participants.
Luckily, this parade went off without a hitch.
So that's my little story about my accidental experience with hundreds of thousands of people coming together on the streets of Berlin to dance and celebrate love.
I have no idea how I will ever be able to top this day's events in a later visit to Berlin, or even throughout the rest of this Euro tour.
Here's hoping I have more stories like this to live and write about in the coming days.
Also, just to self-promote a little bit, this story was written and published using the Launchora app on Android. Ever since we launched our app earlier this week, I've almost exclusively only been using the app to read and write. Whether I'm sitting on the metro, or a cafe, or waiting for the bus, or even at a freaking city-wide parade, I love that I can just take my phone out and write about what I'm seeing or feeling in that moment, or even read some new short story or poem that the amazing writers on Launchora are publishing everyday.
I hope you'll try it out! Get it on the Google Play Store.