Oktoberfest!!

Hello family, friends and fans! Barbara and I have now been back a week after spending a quick night outside London, and a fast weekend in Germany for the opening of Oktoberfest. We flew into Salzburg, Austria (Barb says the Sound of Music was filmed there, it was Mozart's birthplace and she was impressed with the snow capped mountians!) then met up with our friends in Augsburg, Germany. We met up with Brett and Jenny Sterling (from Berlin), Jessica Luhn (from Paris), and Jerod Bradshaw (from Austria). We all attended high school and college together, and we all happened to be living in Europe so we got together for a rare occasion and lots of beer!

The first night we went into Munich and went to an outdoor garden that Brett had been to before. Basically there's a Chinese pagoda, and Umpa band and lots of beer and brats. We each got one litre glass beer mugs which we all ended up keeping. After having a good time there we walked back through the neverending park in the dark. We stocked up on more beer at the station and all ended up back on the train to Augsburg-thankfully! We had a really good time drinking beer on the train (which is acceptable and actually encouraged in Germany). There were plenty of photos to mark this occasion.

We stayed in a youth hostel in Augsburg since there was no room at the inn for us in Munich. This is because Oktoberfest is the largest festival in the world and there were one or two extra people around as a result. 6-6.5 million people have attended the 16 day festival in recent years (this makes Bikes, Blues and Barbeque look like a small get together between friends!). The festival was originally started in 1810 for the future King Ludwig I's wedding reception. The festival has been cancelled 24 times since 1810 due to war, disease and economic emergencies. A staggering 7 million litres of beer are consumed in the 16 day festival! (this is not so surprising when you see these Bavarians drink).

Anyway, enough facts and figures. What was it like? It was awesome! According to our impressions the Germans basically just drink beer and eat a lot of meat, which Brett confirmed is not too far from the truth. We had our taste of sausages and pork knuckles in addition to brew. Oh and don't forget pretzels! They are huge! One of the downsides though was we didn't get a seat in a "tent" (the tents are about the size of Sam's Club, and there are almost 10 of them!). We got to go in to the Paulaner tent and walk around and get pictures but for some reason they've come up with the policy of not serving beer to anyone standing up. Apparently they found out a long time ago that are just too many people at this festival and not enough tents. So you can go into the tent and look around, but since it was opening day and pretty early we knew people weren't about to give up their seats. So we reluctantly left the tent. The area outside of the tents is a huge midway filled with fair rides (I think roller coasters and beer are a cruel mixture personally), food tents, and little shops. I'm really not sure why they don't serve beer outside of the tents seeing as less than half the people I saw actually got into a tent (oh yeah, and by tent I actually mean warehouse). So once we got our fill of snacks, pretzels, and spectacle, we left.

That's it? That was Oktoberfest? Yes, but the spirit of Oktoberfest stayed with our little troop the entire weekend. We weren't about to have the party end, so we went to Hofbrau House downtown. This is world's most famous brewhouse. We thought since everyone was at the festival, the restaurant would be slow right? Wrong. It was full. We got in but we had to sit outside. I'd estimate the temperature that day was around 48-50 degrees F, so it was a bit chilly for eating outside. That didn't bother the three tables of Italians next to us though. They were having a grand old time singing songs we hadn't heard of and toasting each other with their liters of beer every 5 minutes. We had some good food though and some beer.

After we got sick of the cold outside, we left and checked out a nearby gift shop. After that, we made our way back to the Rathaus-Glockenspiel (built in the 1500s) which is a music playing feature of the town hall complete with mechanical life-sized dancing figures. It only comes on at 11am, noon and 5pm so we stuck around for the 5pm one. We went into a coffee shop across the street on the fifth floor and had a nice window view almost at equal height. I'm not sure how much coffee the six of us drank over the course of that weekend, but it definately rivaled our beer consumption. We stayed there and just played cards until they kicked us out around dinner time. In fact, we were pretty good at getting kicked of restaurants and cafes for playing cards. I'm not really sure why seeing as we drank plenty of coffee. Oh well, we're used to finicky shop-keepers, they're all over Europe. We kept playing cards at the train station until it was time for everyone to part ways at about 11:15pm. Brett, Jenny, Jessy and Jerod had to head back to Augsburg for their second night at the hostel while Barb and I had to start a long journey back to England via Salzburg. Our train left the station at 11:30pm. Yuck!

Our itenerary was a nightmare from the beginning of this trip. We had to fly Ryanair because it was the only affordable option. I don't know if anyone knows this, but if you fly Ryanair to or from London it has to be out of Standsted airport. I use the term "London Airport" very loosley because it's a one hour train ride from northern London. Which means it's two hours from Reading. The only flight we could get out of Stansted was at 6:30am and there weren't any trains early enough for us to make it so we were forced to stay in a hotel near the airport the night before. Even still we had to get up at 4am to ensure we cleared security. And it's a good thing we did because Stansted was surprisingly busy at 5:30am. Mostly young people take Ryanair because...well it's not the discount airline for nothing. It's very cramped, your flight times are NOT flexible, they try and sell you stuff over the intercom during your flight, and the service leaves much to be desired. And that was just the one way to Salzburg. For the way back, we were supposed to fly out of Salzburg at 9:30am on Sunday. At the time I really didn't think this was undoable but after we made the journey from Salzburg to Augburg when we arrived, we quickly realized that there was no way we would be able to make it from Augsburg on Sunday morning and still catch our flight. I looked into moving our flight back since I had Monday and Tuesday off work. The pricetag to get a later flight would be £300. That's British Pounds so that's like $600. So we took the course of action that was necessary; we stayed up all night Saturday night and journeyed back to Salzburg early. Barb got some sleep on the train ride back to Salzburg in the middle of the night on Saturday. Once we got to the train station though, my fears were realized: Salzburg has no night life so the public transport wasn't running at 2am. Luckily the cab drivers knew this and were there. I had fully resigned that we might have to walk to the airport across town in the middle of the night. I'm glad we didn't, it's 4.5 miles away.

So we slept for a couple of hours in the darkened airport in the middle of Austria until our flight finally came the next morning. We were exhausted and basically slept for two days when we got home, but it was one of the best trips we've been on! It's was really great seeing our buds.