An American Furry in Germany

Totally gay. But wonderful. It's like Yellow Submarine on acid.
Wait... but Yellow Submarine already was on acid. Okay, it's like Yellow Submarine on gay. Which I guess is a controlled substance now?

EDIT: Hmph. "Gay" isn't a mood choice. Well that's an oversight...

Whew. What a day. Yesterday I got up at around 8 am, and very shortly was off to the Hauptbahnhof to meet furries, and catch a train to Hamburg to meet more furries. As it turns out (from a glance at some of my pictures), it looks like there were at least 30 furries there, along with 11 more in fursuits. That's a lot of people.
When we first arrived, there were already about 20 people there, and not a bit of fur to be seen. So I took out my tail and ears, which cheered everyone up, and served as a sort of beacon. :P (I had taken them with in a duffel bag, I should mention, because I wasn't quite ready to have to explain it to my host family.) We were meeting in a parking lot underneath the Radisson, a giant hotel right next to the Hbf. in Hamburg. Apparently this was where a lot of people were arriving, as we found out when great double-decker buses full of tourists drove by, pointing and taking pictures. More so when the fursuits were finally put on, and they started thumbing for rides and waving at the tourists. Then an hour or so later, we set off.
The weather didn't quite cooperate--it was raining, although only lightly. So the actual fursuit walk was relatively short--just an hour or two. We went through the Japanese Gardens, the fursuiters horsing around, the rest taking pictures, and me somewhere in between. We ran into our fair share of tourists, and I took pictures of the looks on their faces. We didn't get a single negative reaction, unless you count the dog at the train station that wasn't prepared to deal with a new species today. It was quite encouraging. The children were especially delighted, when we ran into some. Adults felt the need to figure it out, and worried a bit for our sanity, but the kids didn't care. "That man has a tail!" was an explanation in itself. That probably says something about the reason I was there in the first place... funny, I usually don't like kids.

And here are the fursuiters...

And here's me trying to smile for the camera, but failing as usual.


After walking around for a bit, the fursuits were taken off (the people inside were literally steaming as they hit the cold outside air--it was amusing), and we went to go get something to eat, before a rendezvous at 5 pm at the Dom. For those of you who don't speak German, "Dom" (pronounced "dome") means "cathedral". So naturally I was expecting a cathedral, and not an amusement park. How naive I was...

Apparently the old cathedral used to be a safe haven for transients and street performers during harsh weather. When it burnt down, the city gave them another area kind of close by, which used to be a field for animals. They kept the name "Dom" though, apparently. Unfortunately this was explained to me right before I saw the sign, or I would have laughed more. :D
So our numbers had dwindled by then, but there were still about ten of us going through the fair, having fun and winning prizes. (We saw a furry tiger head hanging from a prize booth--about an hour later, one of the lost furries came walking back holding it. Apparently it wasn't for wearing, as it had first appeared... but I'm sure it will be modified.) I bent my tail on the Airwolf ride, but it was a lot of fun, and I bent it right back. Oh yeah, and then there was "No Limit", which cost €5 (too much for me...), but looked like a lot of fun. I don't think the video really captures the sense of height, though.


After that, we rode the Ferris wheel, and I got a bunch of pictures of Hamburg from above. Then we began to depart. It was about 8 pm, so I had been on my feet for 12 hours. There were about ten of us by that point, most living in Hamburg, and only one other going back to Bremen. Three of us went off to the train station, where we arrived about 10 minutes late for the train, and had to wait there for an hour. We found another furry also waiting for the same train back to Bremen, so the four of us ate at Pizza Hut, which was very delicious. Three left on a one-hour train ride back, two of us walked out of the main station, he ran off to catch a train, and there I was, finally back in Bremen, a little dazed, all alone at last, and still wearing my furry tail and ears. I had decided by that point that I would go all the way to the house in them, rather than keep it a big secret, but when I got home at around 11:30, everyone was in bed. And now it's Sunday.

It was quite a day.