All You Need is Love Parade

For those of you that aren’t up on the latest eurotrash trends, a love parade is not a 1960s era form of social protest, nor is it a weekly feature on an early morning children’s TV show. Instead, it is a massive outdoor electronic music festival. Tens of thousands of people dance in the streets as DJs slowly drive in a circuit around a public park blasting techno music from the backs of flatbed trucks. It lasts all day. Berlin has a huge one every year.

Santiago held their first ever Love Parade today. An expected crowd of roughly 60,000 all turned out in the scorching heat to dance their hearts out. I was one of them.

I can honestly say that the Santiago Love Parade was one of the most incredible, unabashedly fun things that I have ever been a part of in my life. As the DJ floats snaked their way through streets flanked by stately apartment buildings on their way back to the main park, the residents of the apartments leaned out their windows and dumped buckets of water on the grateful, sweating partygoers below. Everyone dances, jumps, and chants to the music, and the street vendors sell the dancers bottles of cheap mineral water, half of which they promptly shower on anyone within range. The bomberos (firemen) stand proudly on their trucks in front of the stately old Museo de Bellas Artes (Museum of Fine Arts), then turn their fire-hoses on the joyfully bouncing crowd below. I was drenched. After four hours, my friends and I left, completely exhausted. I can still here the music from my room as I write this now, echoing and reverberating off of the city’s stone streets and concrete walls.