Last night (Thursday) saw the annual Monash University German Club (in conjunction with MSA Activites) OKTOBERFEST take place, and boy was that an experience. If I haven't mentioned it before, I'm the current MUGC Treasurer, and so our biggest event for the year held more significance for me than simply a night of beer and folksy music. One would think I'd have attended last years Oktoberfest (as I'm a 2nd year student now), but though I was there briefly most of it escaped my attention. I think I was playing indoor soccer that night, I'm not sure...
Anyway, it certainly was interesting. I got to man one of the barbecues, and my now-famous (or at least it should be) Rolling System churned out 600 sausages for the waiting masses. That was one greasy barbie by the end, let me tell you. The band was loud, German, and worked the crowd, who were joyfully drunk and boisterous. There were of course those who took it a little too far, with the strangest sight of my evening being a gentleman (and I use the term pejoratively) standing at the urinal, balancing himself with his head against the wall, expelling fluids from above and below simultaneously. A strange duality of having both a great degree of, and absolutely no, control over his bodily functions.
Once the baying for scraps had subsided, I ventured inside to degrease myself and grab a commemorative beer stein. And maybe one for Paul. And some for the family. Actually, if anyone's interested, they'll be up on eBay soon ;-) Anyway, I wandered around watching the spectacle, having - as I often do - something I like to think of as "meta-fun"; it's not so much having fun at the event, but rather by observing it and remarking upon its peculiarities. This isn't to say I didn't join in at all! I Charlestoned to a few swing numbers, sung along and did the actions to what German songs I knew, and skipped merrily through the throng arm-in-arm with Gleb.
I chatted with the band and the bouncers for a bit (being the source of sausages made me popular *grins*), and hanging around the entrance/exit meant that I was witness to the few expulsions that occurred. These were rather novel for me, since I go to pubs about as often as a I go to AFL games; and for similar reasons. One bloke got kicked out for flicking matches into a girl's hair, and another got upset at not being allowed to take his beer outside and got shirty with the bouncer. In this situation, needless to say, the bouncers win, so the chap stood at the bottom of the stairs roaring challenges that would make his grandmother blush. Receiving little response, he picked up a plastic bin and hurled it in our general direction, but being pissed and a story below all the managed to do was get gunk over the band members' cars.
Unfortunately for this bloke, throwing the bin and/or hitting the cars meant the bouncers were no longer content to wait for Campus Security to escort him off, and they went after him. I know I shouldn't laugh at large men in suits running, espescially when they could have me on the ground faster than you can tell me what colour underwear you have on, but it was another of those "meta-fun" moments. They caught the bugger in the end; he'd twisted (or broken, I'm not sure) his ankle jumping a fence and had to have an ambulance called for him. I took a very important lesson from this - never taunt fat men and then get caught.
You were expecting, what, Plato?
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