This weekend was a bit crazy. On Saturday night we went to Kunstpark Ost, the Munich dance club section, and had a rip-roaring good time. You could tell you were getting close to the place when it seemed like one out of every five people you passed had a red mohawk. Holger wasn't as impressed with the freaks as I was--he thought they were "designer punks." And I was thinking, would I know a designer punk from an authentic one? It reminded me of my junior high school days when we used to talk about bands, and this one guy would always say "yeah, they're sold-out" if it was a band that more than five people had actually heard of. Back then, I thought Green Day was the bomb, and his strident assertion that they were sold-out befuddled my poor impressionable brain. Now I just think it must be tough to be a punk, having to constantly deny the charge of being a sell-out or a designer-punk. They probably spend every waking hour thinking about how to keep things real and original-like.
I guess there was one big disappointment for the evening, and this was that yes, the Germans are in fact still in love with the 80s. You wouldn't know it from watching MTV (but that stuff's mostly imported anyway). All my roommates agreed when the question was put to them that the 80s were a cool decade with cool pop music, so that I then left, saddened and disillusioned with life, and threw myself into the path of an oncoming truck.
But I survived and went to Kunstpark Ost that evening, being the hardy American-type that I am. And I even danced to German 80s pop in a discotheque (did I just admit this?). Finally, I've found a country where, on the average, people dance worse than I do. Matt, Mark, the indefatigable Norman, Holger and his lately-arrived girlfriend Maren were present. A good time was had by all. When we got back at 2 I was falling asleep standing up, as the 1 hour of sleep on Saturday morning was starting to hit me.
And then today I went to my first beer garden with Mark and Claudia. I ordered a Mass (= 1 liter of beer in a huge freakin' glass) and put it away without any trouble. In the sky there were three clouds: one obscured the late afternoon sun and had a silver lining, another was a nebulous thing from which the incident rays fanned out like in a religious painting, and the third was a huge rolling cumulous that you could watch bubble up time-lapse-photography style. These three stood in a row like some kind of weird alignment of the planets, Jupiter-Venus-Mars. Father Son and Holy Ghost.
Afterwards we went to have some ice cream at an Italian ice cream shop, and sat outside talking about the older and younger generations in Germany, which seems to be a favorite topic of the younger generation (and probably the older too), though they obviously don't see eye to eye on a lot of things. We raced our bikes home--I had to lay down for a while to keep the old stomach in check.
Posted by Alan at May 17, 2002 01:35 AM