Oktoberfest, Munich

Now, I don’t know if you have all been keeping up with the weather reports over here, but we are in a very cold Europe right now. So we decided that since we would be camping, yes that’s right it was cheaper and we thought it was a good idea in March, that we would splash out on thermals. Thank god we did!! On Friday afternoon, we left our warm cosy hostel and headed for our campsite. Got tent number 47 and a wrist band that had not only our tent number on it, but also the address of the campsite just incase security found you in an alley somewhere over the weekend. Sitting on the ground we decided our next necessity was to buy a pool lilo from our tour operators - mine was green and Lizzie’s was pink. Our first night we showered and layered up with our thermals (long johns & 2 singlets each), trackie pants, t-shirts, jumpers and jackets. Oh and 2 layers of socks. Did we sleep? NO!! Had to get up at 6:30am on Saturday morning to get ready to make it to the festival to try and get into the Hoftbrau Hall. We got there at 8am and met a mob of people out the front…we stood there for 2 hours and when we finally got close to the front, we were told no one was coming through the front doors and if you wanted chance to get in get to the back doors. So us and about 400 other people sprinted around the building (I think I even pushed people!) and made it kind of close to a door and got in. This was at 10.30am. We had lost our tour group right at the beginning (bloody waste of money they were) and had to find our own table…this was a mission as everybody was saving seats for people who hadn’t even made it into the hall yet. Finally found some nice guys who squished over. Now I hear you asking why all the fuss for this hall?? Well, this is the hall in which the Mayor Taps the first keg to signal that the festival has started….this doesn’t happen until noon. When this happened thought, it was totally amazing. The crowd of 10 000 people cheering and shouting was crazy! Now all we had to do was wait for a Fraulein (not beer wenches or they don’t come to your table as the table next to us found out) to serve us. This. Was. Painful! We didn’t get our first beers until 1.15pm. Yes, that’s right, we had waited a total of 5 hours to get a beer. Nuts. Absolutely nuts. Tasted good but!! Best fun ever! We had steins and sang and all was well in the world. That is until we had to return to the cold, crappy campsite, better sleep this time thanks to the Hoftbrau!

Day 2 of Oktoberfest had us heading in quite late, around 10, watched the parade with these giant horses bringing in barrels of beer, and lots of traditionally dressed Germans playing music marching through the festival grounds. I quite liked it. We then decided to head into the Lowenbrau beer hall around 1pm and found a table fairly fast considering the beer had already been serving since 12. Made some new friends again and drank until about 7pm. Now I hear you all asking about how many steins we had. We I think I had over the 2 afternoons 6 and Liz the non beer drinker got down 3!!! I am so proud of her, as should all of you!!! What an effort by the girl who has only ever finished half a stein her entire life!!! Now I now, I probably should have had more, but people, these things are massive…they are more daunting than you realise. But with all these steins also came our drunken purchasing of merchandise and here we went a bit crazy…but hey, we now have 3 Oktoberfest half steins, 2 crazy hats, a shirt, a jumper and of course a gingerbread heart!! Campsite sucked again, and no sleep for me as my lilo was completely deflated and Liz didn’t even offer to share hers…drunken bum!!! Got up at 6am on Monday to get back to the nice warm hostel to catch our bus to the next destination.

Oktoberfest rocked!!!