Cowboys sind echt geil, ja!

I was round at my neighbour Deric’s place for dinner the other night. After chatting and drinking a few beers in his porch he suggested heading to the town’s annual Country & Western party. I’d heard that Germans had a weird fascination with the whole cowboy thing, so I could hardly turn down a chance to witness it at first hand. So Deric got into his finest Western togs, he lent me a cowboy hat (he has several) and a friend gave us a lift into town.

These are not cowboy hats

This one's for Alex - an original WWII Afrika Korps pith helmet!!!

The word ‘lift’ doesn’t quite describe the experience. The friend was apparently a bit tipsy, judging from the way she weaved across the road on the way to Zierenberg, her tatooed arms wrestling with the steering wheel like the horns of a stubborn bull. She reluctantly pulled on her seat belt at Deric’s command. In town, ignoring the signs for building works, she plunged down a street that was blocked at the other end, screeching to a halt when she saw the barriers across the torn-up tarmac. “Scheiße!” she spat, as though this was the last thing she’d expected. But, undeterred, she mounted the pavement and squeezed the car roughly through. We were almost there, thank heavens. By this point I was praying that we’d make it there alive. Of all the ways I might choose to die, being killed in a car accident on the way to a Country & Western party is not one of them. The roads near the party were chockablock with parked cars already, so she pulled into what looked like a private car park. “Can you do that?” asked Deric. “I can do anything I want,” she said. Anyway, having survived the journey I could now experience whatever awaited me at the other end.

Odd. That’s all I can say. A line dancing evening at an open air swimming pool in the middle of rural Germany. The band were actually incredibly good, but it was disconcerting to hear them getting the audience pumped in German one moment, and launching into a flawlessly accented imitation of John Denver or Lynyrd Skynyrd the next. To my ear, when they started singing they could’ve just stepped off a plane from Texas. It was incongruous.

No, I didn’t dance. I was too busy being impressed by all the people who were. Being German, they take their line dancing very seriously in Zierenberg: everyone knew the moves, and there were thirty or forty people up there dancing at a time. The best part was how relaxed everything was. It’s a small town, so everyone knew everyone else, beer flowed at £1.50 a pint (more or less), adults drank and danced while kids ran about jumping in and out of the pool. It felt like a big family party. But with cowboy hats.