Swing, Starkbier and the Irish

This week I visited 3 apartments. We’ll see what becomes of them. I also worked, did sport and saw friends, the usual.

 

Thursday night I met up with Birgit who I haven’t seen in absolutely ages to go to the Swing night at Cord (http://www.cord.tv/). I had arranged to go with Philippe as a dancing partner but when I rang him an hour beforehand to check he was still up for going it turned out he was on a train coming back from skiing. He had completely forgotten me. In this end this didn’t matter, and actually worked out really well as it meant that we were able to have a nice chat and then have a little boogie on the dance floor. It’s a really nice club, if pretty small. There is a different theme every night and Thursday is Swing. There is a class from 20:00-20:45 for 3euro and then free dancing. If you go before 21:00 it’s free. When we were there they had a live 12-piece swing band playing, which was great. The highpoint of the night for me was a swing version of Bon Jovi’s “It’s my life”, weirdly effective. 

 

The weekend, however, was a little more unusual, and very busy. For the last month or so Alex had been going on about a DJ called SebastiAn who he’s mad about and I said I’d go with him to erste liga (http://www.ersteliga.com/ ) where he was playing. Or was meant to be playing at least. It was a nice club and we had fun but there was a distinct lack of SebastiAn. We asked but no one seemed particularly disturbed by his absence. The dance floor was pretty cool as it was a proper lit-up 80s style dance floor. But it got VERY full and as it was a Raucherclub there was also the constant danger of fag burns, not great. We had a good night out despite this, leaving at around 5.

 

Saturday, I had planned to see my friend Will who I know from Uni, who is currently living in Essen working in an opera house there. He wasn’t staying with me (in my Doppelzimmer…) and was meant to be staying with another friend of his who at the last minute said that she was too ill to be able to either put him up for the night or see him at all. Will was therefore left at a bit of a loose end. He wanted to look round some museums and then maybe meet up. I suggested the Starkbierfest. I had planned to go to see Watchmen at the Mathäser in English with Alex but it turned out I had invented a showing time (as you do) and instead as it was such a beautiful day we went for a walk along the Isar before lining our stomachs and heading over to the Nockherberg.

 

http://www.nockherberg.com/

 

The Starkbierfest is much like the Oktoberfest, same sort of beer intake, same atmosphere, same people dancing on benches, same music, same ENORMOUS Brezl. However, there is one crucial difference, the Starkbier is STRONG, does what it says on the tin I guess… was really quite merry after just one Maß. Really fun night out with everyone and Will seemed to enjoy himself.

 

That wasn’t such a late night. Lots of people went onto a club but as I had only had about 4 hours sleep the previous night and knew the next day was going to be pretty big, I didn’t go with. So I headed home with Spongebob, the balloon a certain person bought me to irritate me…

 

Sunday was devoted to a long lie in and a lazy morning and then a late lunch with Philippe, Ana and Alex at our Stammrestaurant, the Chinese buffet on the corner.

 

It was drizzling slightly (which I thought made the day even more fitting) when we headed to the St Patrick’s Day. Although Paddy’s day is actually on the 17^th, the Munich Irish community celebrated it on Sunday 15^th.

 

http://www.stpatricksday.de/

 

It was a lot of fun. There was a live band and dancing on the stage. At one point there was a Bolivian dancing troupe, which I found interesting, as I’m not sure exactly what link they had with St Patrick’s Day. After all the dance troupes it was our turn to show off our moves in a big Caileigh (sp?), involving much swinging around, shouting and singing. Much fun.

 

After this finished at around 6, we headed over to Killian’s Irish pub to finish off the evening properly, in a pub! It was absolutely jam packed, the overflow was in the Australian bar where we eventually managed to find a place and eat the best chips I’ve found in Munich so far.

Karaoke

The snow only lasted until early afternoon in the end. As I had been sitting at my computer ALL day so far I jumped at the chance to get outside when Alex rang and asked if I was still up for a walk round the Englischer Garten. However, we hadn’t reackoned with the sludge all around and the cold so instead we wandered to Münchener Freiheit for a coffee (or rather a hot chocolate as neither of us are coffee fans). After waming ourselves in the cafe for a while we decided to walk a bit more…and ended up at Pasta e Basta for supper.

Walking back into the centre of town we thought it might be a nice idea to go to a bar and so, not knowing where was rocking on a Sunday night we randomly tried the Irish pub next to the Frauenkirche. We managed to get seats but the place rapidly began to fill, and then the singing started. Unbeknown to us, Sunday night is karaoke night at the Irish pub (http://kiliansirishpub.com/index.cfm). I also discovered that the Irish pub is where all the Brits hang out. Around Munich I haven’t heard many English accents. There are plenty of Americans around, likewise lots of francophones and a fair few Spanish, but few of my fellow countrymen. However, as I mainly hang out with Germans or Erasmus students this isn’t really surprising. I now know where to go when feeling homesick…to an Irish pub

It was really fun. We didn’t get up on stage but we did sing along to all the songs we knew. Some of the perfomers were really good. Our favourite was the guy who sang Highway to Hell. He was swaying slightly and had a really gravelly voice, destroyed by decades of booze and fags. You could tell he was in a world of his own and was singing more to himself than to the audience. Next time I’m going with a big group, and who knows, I might even be brave (or drunk) enough to get up on stage.