Column: Spring Festival classics – Stuttgart Journal

The well-known booths are a hit at the Cannstatter Wasen

Ever larger roller coasters, free-fall towers, glass labyrinths, amusement rides they roll over faster and faster – no, the small classic stalls are the most popular with visitors.

By Alexander Kappen

Bad Cannstatt. The sight of the ever more extreme fairground rides on the Cannstatter Wasen always gives the Stuttgart Journal reporter a real queasy stomach. Normally he avoids the free fall towers, overturning rides with the screaming passengers, he only rode a roller coaster once in Cannstatt when his buddies (drunk) dragged him into one of them.

That’s why he’s all the happier that the classic stalls, the lottery vendors, such as at “Bauer’s Blumenland”, where every lottery ticket wins and you can take flowers and plants home with you, or the shooting galleries, Hau den Lukas or the stalls where you can shoot down stacked towers of rifles with a ball, the “classics” are extremely popular. Long lines form in front of it, everyone wants the “easy games”. Similar to the parlor games where “Mensch ärgere dich nicht” and similar things are still very popular today, people in uncertain times like to strive for the well-known.

Riding the Ferris wheel and swaying to hits in the beer tent – yes, that’s how the festivals were celebrated a hundred years ago and that’s a good thing, the reporter thinks! Let’s go to the Wasen, the biggest spring festival in the world in good old Swabia!