As per the above link, last year's Karneval attracted 1.45 million people, and you can quite believe it given the sheer mass of people there. The struggle to get out of the train station just to get to the Karneval should have clued me in, but when we went looking for our neighbours we were almost immediately trapped in a slow moving crowd. The stalls on either side of the walkways were doing a very brisk trade as people ducked into them just to get away from the crowd, and the noise was pretty amazing. All manner of voices, languages, and accents. Tangential and I cracked up when a voice called out in a very distinctive Australian accent, 'Hey, do you wanna crepe? I wanna crepe.' Bless.
It seems silly to be surprised by a cultural difference in a carnival like this, but one of the first things we were struck by was the number of people who liked Maddyn's monkey backpack. We've never used it frequently, but it has D rings on the bottom, clips across the chest, and comes with a lead. He thinks it's fabulous, but I've never come across too much support for the idea of leashing children and so was very surprised when we had a number of people come up and ask--one even in English--where we bought it! The one who spoke English mentioned he has a two year-old, and would love something like that so she couldn't run away. I hear him. We took it off so the kids could go on the bouncy slide and before I could put it back on Maddyn spotted a gap in the crowd and sprinted away. The kid's been training for nearly six months on his balance bike and he can run. I pretty much dared for anybody to judge me after managing to catch my son after a five minute run and him deciding to weave in and out of the kind of toilet line you get when you've got over a million people in one spot. 
And, of course, the toilet queues you get at a festival where beer tents outnumber the vendor tents. Bier 3 euros; Vodka & Spek, 2.50.
Lolly stand!
After a couple of hours of browsing through stalls and admiring the sheer number of alcoholic options available, we came across a harassed-looking woman who, for a euro fifty, was able to load us up with all the sugar energy we needed to get back to the music stages once more. At least, with the number of people there I ended up with Maddyn on my shoulders for about four hours all up, so if nothing else I needed my strength! We trundled back through the enormous German barbecue stands, found a bier tent which kindly sold cola and apfelschorle (apple lemonade?) in glasses, and I shared a chicken curry with Maddyn outside an Indian stand quite hastily upon finding out that the plastic bowl I was using had a two euro pfand--a deposit that you can get back once you've returned the bowl. All in all it was a spectacular day. My back and feet were glad of the seat I managed to finally get on the s-bahn when we were a few stops away from home, but I'd love to go again next year.
We never did find our neighbours.
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