Bits of Bavaria: Clubbing

Another couple of excerpts from my au pairing blog last year, detailing the horrors of the clubbing scene in small-town Bavaria/Austria. Carina was the only other au pair in the village I lived in and she would periodically make us hit the clubs with her; unfortunately as we had to drive everywhere, no drinking was involved and it was all awful.  Clubbing in Eggenfelden

Our evening did not get off to a great start: we drove half an hour to Eggenfelden only to be refused escape from the freezing tundra as I had forgotten my ID. The silver lining of this tragically embarrassing event was giant pretzels and cans of Red Bull from a petrol station during our second journey back, and the start of house music hour on Radio Deepest Bavaria. As well as the constant blizzard that kicks off every evening despite no chance of settling, our return journey was plagued by painfully sensible German drivers and gale force winds that buffeted Carina’s tiny car scarily close to the drop on either side of the road - particularly terrifying in the pitch black of rural nighttime.

(On a sidenote, a bonus of the double drive there and back was my first close up view of the chemical factory that is the sole reason that Burghausen is anything more than the poverty-stricken hole it had become by the end of the 19th century. Wacker Chemie employs 10,000 people and runs this mother. I’ve yet to meet a man between 20 and 60 who lives within 5km of Burghausen and does not work at the plant in some capacity; Father Merget is a chemist there, Carina’s boyfriend works the night shift, their football team is the pride of the region. It’s a cross between a monstrosity and a monument, illuminated 24/7 and breaking the skyline for miles around, crouching above the town like an industrial Mordor belching steam and occasional clouds of fire into the night. I try not to dwell on the fact that googling Wacker gives you an awful lot of information up until 1930, and then an awful lot from 1950, and a mysterious historical silence in the middle.)

We finally got into the club, where we spent an hour awkwardly dancing to some truly horrible music with lyrics like “bouncing on ma dick dick dick” from a DJ who seemed to think that mixing consists purely of poking the turntables at the most inopportune point in song, and making sure every track plays over the last for at least 10 seconds of uninterrupted dissonance. Everyone looked about 14. At 2am a pungent and inexplicable smell began to pervade the dancefloor, and everyone fled to the various VIP sections and smoking areas. We ended up in a Grey Goose bar with soft porn hip hop videos projected onto the walls and what looked like the entire cast of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding after a few hundred shots. The occupants of this room could have passed as the definition for “hair and fashion choices we will regret in five years”, and almost everyone seemed to be related or romantically involved. Probably both. A few minutes after our arrival some sort of beef began between the world’s worst gel and highlights combo and a male Snookie, and for the rest of the night a palpable tension simmered below the surface as the bar divided itself into two glaring and yet still hip wiggling factions. Montagues and Capulets, Jersey Shore style.

It did get better towards the end, when I just stopped giving a shit and really got my groove on with Angelica and the only vaguely stylish women I have come across since moving to this country. Although we did our best to wordlessly convince each other that it wasn’t so bad with our enthusiastic moves and stifled yawns, we mutually admitted defeat at around 3am and piled into our exit vehicle. I think we were all glad when Carina turned on the ignition and said, “We are never coming here ever again.”

Clubbing in Salzburg

In installment 2 of Clubbing Sober Makes Me Want To Kill Myself And Everyone Around Me, Carina and I travelled to Austria for the evening, and I wanted to kill myself and everyone around me.

German law forbids all forms of dancing on Good Friday across its territories (seriously, I couldn’t make this shit up), so we drove an hour over the border in order to “enjoy the night life”. Our journey into Salzburg was made unnecessarily stressful by a combination of mine and the GPS’s vast incompetence; we ended up outside of Schloss Klessheim and on the wrong side of the river before we finally nabbed a spot in a terrifying parking complex deep in the belly of the old city walls.

Hit up a tastefully lit trendy bar. Had some Austrian white wine - grim. I had forgotten that Austria has absolutely no smoking bans, so coughed through our pre-drinks choked by the smoke of a thousand cigarettes. The club was still worse - I saw one woman’s hair become accidentally alight on the dance floor, and despite showering this morning my own still smells like ash. PTSD o’clock. The place was already full of graphic face eating on our arrival, despite the standardly weird median age; although there was significantly less of the I-should-be-doing-my-homework-rather-than-drinking-this-shot bracket, there were a disturbing amount of middle-aged men and female supply teacher sorts. And I will never understand the love of techno here as everyone seems as completely incapable of dancing to it as I am.

The short of it is, I was a terrible sport last night. Although I did my best to keep up the party face and maintain chat with a range of conversational partners such as the gay Italian father-of-two, and the German “businessman in town for the night”, by half 2 my activities were limited to glaring at Carina and mouthing to “PLEASE LET'S LEAVE PLEASE”. At 3 I gave up and began playing Temple Run at the bar, literally ignoring each of the three men who approached me with that enticing chat up line, “why so serious?”. By 4 I seem to have completely lost it, as this morning I found a note on my iPhone reading “I despise life, Austria, men, but most of all Carina”.

So there you have it. My first trip to Salzburg. I don’t recommend it.

(Carina has since escaped to a city with a man she met during this particular clubbing experience... they've now been together for a year and are DEEPLY IN LOVE, so admittedly not an entirely wasted clubbing experience. For her.)