Misleadingly close and yet so many worlds apart

Last saturday morning, when I was enjoying my well deserved saturday-morning lie in, my peace was crually disturbed. When I first heard the noise, I thought "Funny! The bakery's flour-truck sounds just like a bunch of drums in a marching band this morning."
I thought nothing further of it and resumed reading. Minutes later, the commotion still hadn't dies down, but was infact increasing and I then realized that what sounded like a bunch of drums in a marching band was not my arch-enemy, the early-morning flour truck, but what really sounded like a bunch of drums in a marching band was, in fact, a bunch of drums in a marching band. I stepped onto my balcony and there I saw them underneath, parading up Sonnenallee towards Hermannplatz:



A bloody Karnevalsumzug! (A Karnevalsumzug, dear non-german readers being the south american carneval's parade's ugly little mutant step brother, hump and all. Imagine a nice parade, take away everything fun and add silly hats and you got the picture...)

I watched them march past, the next band behind the bloody Funkenmariechens playing a sorry little brass version of Ob-La-Di by the Beatles.
In this moment, there was just one piece of information crisscrossing my synapses and blocking every other thought. It went like this:

THIS MUST BE THE SINGLE MOST PATHETIC THING I'VE EVER SEEN!!

...apart maybe from that one time when Boris Becker tried to deny that Anna Whatshername's ugly little ginger baby was in fact his. So, yeah, that might have been even more pathetic, maybe. But apart from that...
Anyways...this parade ranges among the two single most pathetic things I have ever seen.

Picture the scene:
There were about, what?, fifty of them...marching four abrest and waving to a crowd ... that wasn't actually there!!!
People in Berlin don't line the streets for jerks in costumes. Especially not in Neukölln and ESPECIALLY not at nine o'clock on an innocent saturday morning. They even had some old guys in silly hats (you know, the sort with peaks and bells) shoutung "Alaaaf" every now and then. The people here would have been, at the most, puzzled by this kind of behaviour. If there HAD actually been any people.



I can literally hear the conversation in my head when they decided to march up Sonnenallee, somewhere in a Vereinszimmer in Köln am Rhein: "Did you know that there is this place in Berlin called "Neukölln"?That sounds like Neu-Köln! I'd say that's just the place for us!"

And again, merciful (or merciless, depends on your point of view) reality took her sledgehammer and showed some rhineian Frohnaturs what a fucking big difference one "l" is able to make.

...sorry for the inflationary use of "in fact"s...