Oktoberfest

Just along the Cooks River from home is the Concordia Club. It's a German social club that used to be on Stanmore Road - in a 70's style Brutalist building. Thankfully, they downsized a few years back and took over the Tempe Lawn Bowls Club. Greens and clubhouse. Germans going to greens... not new.

And like Munich, they have the Bavarian Oktoberfest. Beer, music and dancing.
John and I went along on Saturday to sample the Germanic festivities, and resample, and resample. I only had six beers (which should be "biers"), over a couple of hours. Half litre steins are the go - $7 for a take home glass stein and $6.50 to fill it. That makes my intake being three litres of Warsteiner, a brilliant Pilsener. We were drunk, but strangely not as drunk as if you drank that volume in a local pub. Then again, I doubt any local (apart from Concordia Club) would have it on tap. As we exercised our stein arms, we met some locals - Simon from Tempe; and Kim and John from atop the Warren Cliff. Hope to catch up with them in the future.

We arrived as a procession of very Anglo Medieval marchers were about to parade. Decked out in finery of felt and feathers; with a couple of drummers and pipers, they did a great tattoo (see the photos). Afterwards, we spoke to Helmut, who was manning a barbecue and cooking German sausage. We know his name as he sported a Concordia Club badge proudly proclaiming "Helmut, Director". He told us that the marching group was "found" as they practised in the adjoining parkland. (I can't do his German accent in text but he said; "You must march at our Oktoberfest". And so it goes.)


After the parade, the Medieval Anglos made good use of the Green Common, and proceeded to play Croquet.

Michelle Turcscanyi and her husband, Atti, do Hungarian folk dancing. I worked with Michelle for many years as she is the art director for Time magazine - but a corporate schism has occurred and I no longer work on Time. Their dance group did an amazing set - fifteen minutes of folk dance. One of the photos here shows them being introduced and the MC was explaining how the dancing is unstructured and free flowing; with men solo first, women solo next... then coupling. The band in the background is a German band brought over especially for the event. They only speak Deutsch, so the MC was doing a lot of explaining. They played mostly bad eighties pop but in German, which made it bearable. But it was a good time to stumble upstream towards home.