Oktoberfest

Rune,Lukasz, Mafalda, Kamila and I went to visit the German cultural festival known as "Oktoberfest" from 25 Sep to 28 Sep. In addition to our party, Mimi and a lot of the Americans from work had chosen that weekend to visit Oktoberfest.

Rune and I flew in in the evening on Friday 25th, coming in very late to our hotel. We met up with Lukasz, Mafalda, Kamila and Thomas the morning after. Lukasz, Mafalda and Kamila were staying at Thomas' place and had arrived fairly early on Friday, so they were already several beers in front of us.

We made our way to the festival area, and walked around for a while, looking for tables at the outside bier gartens. Getting a spot inside the beer tents in the weekend is pretty close to impossible, since you have to reserve tickets more than half a year in advance, and big companies scoop up the tickets early. Not having seats turned out to be a big problem, as the waiters refuse to serve anyone not sitting. Thomas, being a Munich native, showed us that it was just a matter of getting a single seat, and working from there. There is no limits to how much beer you can order, so once we found an empty seat, Thomas ordered six beers and taught us how to drink while standing up without getting too tired in the arms. The 1-liter beer mugs they serve during Oktoberfest weigh quite a lot, and there are several different techniques for holding them in order to rest our arms. Always good to have a local to fill you in on the local customs. During the day we got fairly drunk, some more so than others. I managed to contract a cigar burn on my wrist, and I never smoke cigars, so I'm pretty sure I also had my share of the booze.




Sunday morning was a pretty slow day, owing to the events of the night before. It had been designated as our "Cultural day" in order to have an alibi for the trip. The cultural part of it was visiting the monastery at Andechs, just outside Munich. This is a popular tourist destination, because it is one of the oldest churches in Germany. Besides...they brew their own beer and have an enormous bier garten on the premises ;-). We spent most of the day in the bier garten, eating schweinhaxe, drinking radler and generally trying to recover from last nights events. In the afternoon we went to the outskirts of Munich to go to a jazz bier garten to meet up with the American crowd from work. When we showed up there were almost no people left, and no jazz. We moved on to a latino style bar downtown.

Monday morning we went down to the festival area again, and found seats in the Ochsenbraterei-tent. This is a tent with room for approximately 10.000 people, and their specialty is barbecuing bulls whole. The meat was delicious, and they had a lot of traditional entertainment like horn music and mass-holding duels. We walked around the festival grounds for a while, trying out the rides and the food on the way, before going to the airport and flying back to Holland.

Pictures are here.