Beer + Meat + Rollercoaster = Heaven

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Beer

Keyboard geezer

Ride

Table dancing

Will Ferrell's Brother

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We woke up a little bleary eyed. Joel especially. He had somehow lost everyone from the group last night and had a bit of an adventure getting back to the hostel. Despite the beerfest being one long street Joel managed to get lost, thinking at one stage that he was actually out of the festival and on the streets of Munich, I’m surprised the giant fairground rides and large beer halls didn’t give it away.

Nicola and I decided to get some fresh air and go for a walk down to the train station to book our trip to Friedrichshafen where we were flying out from. That cleared the head a bit so we headed back to the festival. We thought a ride might wake us up even more. It was one of those ones where you are sitting facing outwards and you are slowly raised in the air and then dropped at a million miles an hour. I felt like puking my guts up after that. A stroll round some of the sights, including getting some photos taken with the local Bavarians, sorted that out and by midday we were sitting outside with a stein of beer and half a chicken each. Yum. They don’t bother with vegetables or carbs, you just get a heap of meat; brilliant.

After lining our stomachs it was time to head into the beer tents again, this time we went to the famous Lowenbrau. Once again our group was one of the rowdiest. One of the group a guy called Simon, bought roses off a guy selling them, put them in his mouth, did a caterpillar dance along the table and then started eating the flowers. Just normal behaviour really. Ladies with breathalyzers walk around trying to find the drunkest person, Simon must have definitely been close.

That afternoon was spent dancing on the tables, cracking up at a guy in the band on the keyboard who thought he was in Metallica he was rocking out so hard, marveling at the fact that one of the guys in our group looked like Will Ferrell’s younger brother (check out his dance), and prosting. Prosting is German for ‘cheers’. Every 20 minutes or so the band start a prosting song and everyone starts clinking steins. It is rumoured that if you don’t look the person in the eye that you are prosting with then you will be cursed with years of bad sex so there is a lot of eye contact.

The sheer amount of beer and food that is sold is quite phenomenal, if you watch one of the videos you will see the speed at which beer is poured, also one of the photos shows oven upon oven full of chicken. The people working at the festival get paid extremely well, and apparently the beer ladies can get sums of around 20,000 to 30,000 Euros for a months work. Not sure if this is just beer fuelled rumours, but if it is true then I am thinking about learning German, wearing a skirt and growing pig tails.

Later on in the evening we decided it was time to go on a few more rides. I thought that it might be a bit dangerous considering the amount we'd drunk. Not dangerous for us, but for the people below in case someone felt queasy and turned into a human sprinkler. It was fine though, I felt heaps better than I had earlier, the beer definitely makes the rides better. To top off a perfect day we had a couple of hot dogs each before bed.

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