Why are they marching?

Officially, it’s a thing to preserve local tradition, in actuality it’s a way to get plastered, make deals with local small business tyrants, and get a gun license if you’re into that. I’m referring to the Schützen (“marksmen”) that are huge in rural parts of the Rhineland and a token few other places, but other places have similar, thematically different clubs for wearing uniforms, marching around, getting drunk and doing a little tit for tat with your small town business network. As you can see here , they’ll carry around toy guns while out in town, the real ordinance gets given out when they take turns shooting at a wooden bird mounted on a large pole to determine who of them gets to be this year’s Marksman King. The king has to buy everybody free drinks and gets to ride in a carriage and shit like that, and builds a fake castle out of plywood or paper mache around his house’s front door (this makes it sound as if he’s some kind of rare bird, but it actually be like that), and then they all meet at the “King’s Residence” to drink more beer. As the king has to pay all of that out of his own pocket, it’s a prestigious thing to even take a serious shot at the bird. You compete to become King to demonstrate to the people that you’re affluent and popular.

As you can imagine, all of that is incredibly chuddy in most places.

I know German cuisine can be bland, but surely you don’t just eat potatoes like apples?

They’re mostly a popular side dish, the foundation for potato salad (a classic for christmas dinner) or a kind of hash browns (delicious Reibekuchen, or Rievekoche as we call them in the Rhineland), and of course everybody loves fries. Or potatos from the pan. Or baked potatos. Or crocettes. Or sourdough with potato, which i highly, highly recommend, it gives a juicy, chewy texture to the bread and makes it stay fresh longer.

Admittedly, the German love for the Kartoffel is a bit of a cliché, most of us eat a lot of international cuisine, and you can get excellent Turkish or Arabian fast food almost everywhere. But Turkish and Italian immigrants started caling Germans Kartoffeln as a comeback to constantly being called Spaghetti or Döner (note that the Germans calling them that likely eat a ton of spaghetti and döner themselves, i guess it really is always projection).

So because of that Kartoffel joke, chuds now think that blond, blue-eyed German schoolkids are constantly called Kartoffel by evil muslims gangster kids and insist that being called a Kartoffel is an n-word level form of racism. Basically, Kartoffel is the German equivalent to cracker or whitey. So i just love to throw that word around in the same way that American posters here will post about majonaise, or to trigger chuds when i’m on the German-speaking part of the internet.