Love Parade in Berlin

The most interesting and bizarre time of the year to visit Berlin is during the Love Parade. In a strict sense, it doesn’t have very much to do either with love or a parade. “Love Parade” is the name given to the most prominent European rave carnival, which takes place on the second Saturday of July every year in Berlin.
The paradox is pleasantly quaint but also, in a way, apt. The Love Parade denotes not so much a particular procession of people marching somewhere for a serious purpose, as the general atmosphere of relaxing and unwinding.
It starts at two o’clock in the afternoon when from every direction crowds of whistling people in bright, colourful wigs, horns and feathers gather at the legendary Alley of the 17th of June, and it continues until ten o’clock in the evening.
Everything, as far as possible, has to take place in the open air – performing techno and underground music, dancing on moving platforms, and everywhere else. The Love Parade seems almost like a celebration of music, youth and freedom – often ignored in favour of sterner matters – and this spirit of release appears to take over the entire procession.
People gravitate from the Brandenburg Gates to Earnest Ruter Platz along the Alley of the 17th of June, the main alley of Tiergarten Park. The fringes are lined with hospital attendants and police gazing timidly at the Love Parade from behind the bushes.
Meanwhile, people are preparing feverishly for the event in which the Love Parade culminates. After dancing eight hours running, teenagers look without a hint of fatigue, although some of them have lost consciousness for short spans of time.
Sunflowers and whistles, which are the symbols of the Love Parade, pink boas, lilac wigs, carnival spectacles with orange lenses, containers with colour hair sprays also have a part to play in the festivity. At nearly every metro station and square these things are available before Love Parade.
There is a municipal water provision in Berlin in advance: people dressed in blue, almost police uniforms, stand with lots of bottles of mineral water.
The climax of the Love Parade is the final set performed by Doctor Motter, the founder of the Love Parade, in the centre of Tiergarten.