In which we look for Waldo and hope desperately that he'll hang on to his scarf and hat for a change.

Otherwise known as the Alstervergnügen, a.k.a. the "How many hot Glühwein-filled people can you pile on a frozen body of water before it breaks?"-Game. In case you're wondering, the answer is "x > 1,100,000", which happens to be the approximate number of hot Glühwein-filled people that swarmed the Alster last weekend. The icy wind of the past two weeks has been breezing rumors from Hamburger to Hamburger about whether or not, and then later when, the Alster would officially be opened for frolicking. It was finally announced at the end of last week that the ice was thick enough for a mega party and the city, a faithful proponant of festivals both spontaneous and planned, declared Alstervergnügen upon its citizens. For those of you who do not have the regular pleasure of having silly German sounds in your mouth, "das Vergnügen" translates into words such as "enjoyment", "fun", "pleasure", "amusement", and "delectableness". Basically it's like a big block party celebrating how cool it is to have your city built around a buncha watah. There's one every summer, but it rarely ever gets cold enough for the Alster to freeze over, which is clearly a perfect excuse to go spend excessive amounts of time out of doors. ...Right?

In anticipation of this event, I kept hearing people exclaim how the Alster only freezes over around once every ten years and how the last time this happened was in 1996 or some such rubbish. I know for a fact that the Alster was just as frozen and person-bedecked two winters ago, though I don't remember there being any official city Vergnügening, which must be what all the fuss is about. In any case, some friends and I added our footprints to the body count tally on Sunday. I'll tell you what, the giddiness on the ice spread faster than germs in a kindergarten classroom. Just like two years ago.

It was just a Hungry-Man frozen dinner buffet for the eyes. There were all flavors of people, bicycles, baby strollers, giddy diggidy dawgs, sledders, small people that were bundled to immobile extremes, big people bundled in incredible amounts of animal, ice skaters, smoochers and giant squid kites, to name a few. Booths were set up on both sides of the shore selling mulled wine, Wurst, delicious vegetarian curry and all sorts of other yums. Rosy grinning grimaces abounding. 

We mingled with the masses until the great snow-slurping fog replaced the sun residue with purpley haze and we all went home to drink tea and wrap our frozen legs in sweatpants warmed on the heater and snuggle up with the memory of the enjoyment, the fun, the pleasure, the amusement, the delectableness of the day.

Techno-update: The puta's dead like whoa, but thanks to the Mighty Notification Umph of the Book of Faces, a friend heard of my plight and offered to sell me her swanky new Netbook for a delicious price. It basically looks like a regular laptop that someone accidentally stuck in the dryer. A cute little thing that functions well while lacking the convenient burdons of lots of memory space and DVD drives. The keyboard dimensions are teaching my fingers to type in a squished and German fashion, but I don't have any serious complaints. I did lose a very healthy chunk of my research notes and oodles of photos, though I am confident that they can be rescued from eternal hard drive hibernation with some careful techno-spelunking. Now I've just got all these mega terabytes of gratefulness for being back on the bandwagon and nowhere to store them.