Long version, and eventually pictures, after the jump (click the title of the post)
Left work a little early on Friday (Not much happens on Fridays in London anyway. High correlation with 'liquid lunches'). I borrowed some lederhosen that Stewart had purchased a few weeks ago when he was there. The Munich airport is a good ways outside of the city center, so it was dinner time by the time I got to our hotel in Munich. Will Watters had flown in the day before and had already scoped out some cool places to go. We immediately went to a cool farmer's market/beer garden in the center of town for lots of meat and beer. After some much needed nourishment, we headed off to the Oktoberfest fair grounds.
Oktoberfest is essentially like a huge state fair, but specifically for drinking. They have all the same rides that we are used to seeing at the Texas state fair. But they also have these massive tents that hold upwards of ten thousand people. It is really a sight to behold. We were late to the party and hadn't made reservations to any of the tents, so we checked out a few. Each tent is run by a specific beer hall from the surrounding area. The biggest ones are Haufbrauhaus, Hippodrome and Augustiner. We were outside the Haufbrauhaus waiting in line (one out, one in sort of thing and the cute German girls kept getting to go in first, strange) when a nice German guy offered us his two extra wristbands to a special area. £20 later, we were in! I'll try to add pictures later, but you cannot imagine the size and level of activity in these tents. There is a traditional German band on a raised platform. At this tent, they played some unintentionally funny songs that every could sing along (the best example: "We are the world, we are the children"). After every other song they also played 'Ein Prosit'. The lyrics of which translate to ' A toast! A toast! A warm place to drink! (Repeat once) one, two, three, guzzle!'
We made friends with some nearby Germans that didn't speak English, so we just kept saying 'Prost!' and bashing our steins together. As for the rest of the evening, let's just say they are VERY big, very strong beers and that I smuggled out a beer stein.
Saturday Woke up and had breakfast and caffeine to overcome the inherent hangover. Threw on the lederhosen (again, pictures later...probably) and went to the fairgrounds. Since this was the 200th anniversary of Oktoberfest they had a special area that was much more traditional. Since we weren't quite up for the party-atmosphere yet, we thought we'd check it out. We found the tent there, which played traditional Bavarian music and had lots of traditional Bavarian dancers on a stage doing essentially German line dancing. I didn't hear any other English being spoken in that tent, which made it more fun. The beer was even darker and even stronger though, so we made more friends with the people that sat at our table. This was a very cool scene as it was almost entirely people from other parts of Bavaria coming in to celebrate, instead of tourists (damn those tourists!!) looking to get drunk. Subtle, but important difference.
Saturday night, Watters and I met up with a friend of ours, Molly, who had gone to Wake with us. She is engaged to a guy from Dallas who is playing professional soccer for one of the clubs in Munich, 1860. We grabbed drinks away from the festival grounds and then the four of us (Watters, Molly, Kenny and I) went to one of their local haunts in Munich. Molly and Kenny have had some really cool experiences living throughout Europe during Kenny's years playing soccer there. Just a totally different experience than Watters and I had going to work for big I-banks straight from school.
Sunday morning and it was time to travel back to Old Blighty via plane, train and automobile. The travel home was 418949848 times harder than the flight there. Flight was late, full and turbulent. I left my kindle at customs and generally spent the rest of my Sunday on public transportation or trying to track down my beloved Kindle. I was successful, by the way, so no need to send flowers. Also, there is the whole issue of elevated travel alerts and a tube strike on Monday. Awesome.
PICTURES:
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| Lederhosen |
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| Note the size of the beer. Watters is at least 6'1" |
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| Watters with one our Non-English speaking friends |
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| Watters and I at the traditional tent |
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