Sunday, July 06, 2008

A day at the fair

Yesterday a few of us visited the Schützenfest to check out the festivities. We were surprised at the lack of actual shooting (where all the Schützen were we didn't know) as the main festival area is just a big fairground. Despite the disappointment at not seeing anything getting shot at we decided to explore the fairground. It had all the rides you'd expect from your general fun fair in the UK (bumper cars, ghost trains, fun houses, roller coasters, ferris wheels, and every kind of spinning machine you care to mention) along with a good selection of more German-style-fayre in the form of sausage vendors and beer tents. I went on all the rides I could find that had "Star" in the title. The first of which, Star flyer, was your general spiny-round swings on chains set up, but then elevated a good 30 metres or so into the air. It gave a good view of the surrounding and was a rather relaxing ride. The other ride I went on was the Star gate (you know, like from the film and TV series) except it wasn't a worm-hole that you could step through to other far flung parts of the universe, it just spun you round in different directions and at various angles to the horizontal. Perhaps the strangest thing we saw was a tent in which a man was trying to get members of the public to take part in what I can only assume was an illegal, unlicenced, boxing match. He paired up the punters with his own fighters and then took them into the tent followed by a crowd of the public who were baying for blood (well not really, but some of them might have been.) We could only assume that some kind of bare-knuckle fight-to-the-death style action went on. The fest is on for the whole week, so at some point we're going to have to find out where the shooting's at.

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