Backyard Fun

Living on the sixth/seventh floor of an apartment building near the middle of the city of Graz, technically I have no backyard. Instead, I have this.



A public soccer field. It used to be home to the city's team, SK Sturm, but they relocated to a larger stadium a little further from the city center a few years ago. This field is now home to amateur games for both kids and adults. Now that the weather is nice, on any given night we can go out on the balcony and watch a game.



Aside from the fact that I am not really that much of a soccer fan, there is a downside to this: cheering crowds. It can be quite loud. Add to that the PA system on which a playlist of about 3 songs is constantly blared, on repeat mode, and if you don't keep your sense of humor about you, it can be a bit trying.

Just beyond the field is the Grazer Messe, the city fairgrounds. Recently, a traveling performance, "Afrika, Afrika!" has moved in and set up a colorful tent city just visible beyond the trees at the far end of the soccer field.



The show is apparently an African version of Cirque du Soleil, replete with music, drumming, dancing and acrobatics. It is extremely popular, and its tour has therefore been extended so that it will be gracing the neighborhood until July 7. I intend to go at some point, but plan to memorize the songs and lineup before I go, so I can better appreciate seeing the visual accompaniment to the music that I can hear quite clearly from my balcony every night. It is a nice addition to the usual screaming soccer fans and the Scissor Sisters' "I don't feel like dancing."

Last night the neighborhood auditory ambience reached a new level of provocation as the beer garden adjoining the soccer field invited a live musical act, "Sunrise," a duo of middle-aged tone-deaf Austrian men who slaughtered their way through 5 sets of covers.




We were awed by their prowess with a synthesizer, which jauntily continued blaring their background music despite the keyboard stylings of the guy in black. Even more impressive was the karaoke-esque performance of the guy in white, who artlessly blundered through such favorite standards as "Proud Mary," cracking the high notes and missing modulations right and left, knocking aside microphone stands in his ever-increasing level of intoxication. Best of all was when the duo joined forces in gut-wrenching, ear-splitting duets, in which they both seemed content to pick their own key and stick with it to the bitter end.

The crowd cheered, danced and sang along, and consumed copious quantities of alcohol. Alas, I -- stupidly -- did not join in, stubbornly of the belief that no amount of alcohol could ever make it okay, much less enjoyable.

And yet there was something endearing about it all, when the guys cracked corny jokes in heavy dialect between their musical abortions. I suppose it is a case of tolerating something in a foreign culture that one would never tolerate in her own.