The Street Parade is the biggest, annual party event in Switzerland and one of the biggest in whole Europe. It can even keep up with the Love Parade in Berlin and has become that famous in the last decade, that visitors from the whole European continent attend this ultimate party event!
The Street Parade started about ten years ago, when about 50 people decided to rent a wagon to protest against violence and to support tolerance and basically just peace & love. Throughout the years, more and more people started to join the annual parade and it grew fast and immensely. Meanwhile, the parade has around 1 million visitors each year and is clearly included in the government’s budget plan. The record was 2001, where 1, 2 million people showed up at the parade and even the number of Love Parade visitors was beaten!
The Street Parade takes place on 9th and 10th August in the whole city of Zurich. It starts around noon on Saturday, and a huge rally consisting of about 50 party wagons moves along the lake through the city. On each wagon, different DJs are spinning while people are dancing on and around the wagons. It is all so crowded that it is really hard to make your way through the city. Cars are prohibited to drive that weekend and the sound, basically house, techno and trance, is to hear everywhere.
The most famous DJs from Europe, and even DJs from other continents (i.e. Carl Cox from the USA) perform and make this event a meeting place of the best of the best. The rally ends around 6 PM, but the party goes on of course. All the different clubs in Zurich offer special parties that night and it’s really a difficult thing to decide which club to visit. Each year, the main station party is held as well throughout the night and is like the only of the about 40 parties which is for free. The best thing is that main station is in the huge entrance hall of the station and turns the station into a big party place for one night. The party really rocks there and people go all crazy.
Peeps joining the event their first time might be curious about the spaced out dressings of several visitors, but that’s exactly one of the purposes of this event: Tolerance. Tolerate any dressing and any looking and just have fun and party the whole night. Don’t be surprised to see guests wearing googols for examples, or having a vacuum cleaner on their backs. Unfortunately, since the event provided the government with that much money, it has become really commercial the past years and most of the people have forgotten that this should actually be a demonstration for love and peace. Most of the visitors just come there because ’’everybody is going there and you can’t miss it.’’ No doubt it will become even more commercial in the near future.
Another point is the drugs: Many, many joiners are high on drugs such as Ecstasy, LSD, Speed or just completely on alcohol or weed. The ambulance is busy all day and all night and it’s not surprising if somebody faints. I.e. at the last Street Parade 2003, about 1000 people had to be picked up from the ground and brought to hospital. If it goes really bad, people might even die caused by too heavy drug influence. Since in August, the weather mostly turns out to be really hot and peeps on drugs are dancing all day in their drug-trance, there’s mostly far too little water being drunk and this is the main cause that results in unconsciousness.
Overall the street parade makes Zurich a one day and night paradise for people who are really into this kind of music.