OKTOBERFEST

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If there’s one thing that you should try to do add to your bucket list, I’d strongly suggest throwing Oktoberfest on there. Now considering that the biggest carnival type event I’ve ever been to is the DuPage county fair, I guess I don’t really have too much to compare it to, but I’m fairly certain that Oktoberfest is the world’s biggest celebration on earth. It doesn’t matter where you’re from or what language you speak, if you show up at this thing with a smile on your face, you’ll be sure to make friends (and I’ve got stories to back this up too!). There are people from everywhere on earth, all coming to one place for one reason: do drink the best beer on earth…sometimes in obscenely large quantities. I’m not kidding about the beer either, look at the picture and tell me it’s not the tastiest looking beer you’ve ever seen. So, now, on to the story.
Our train on Friday was leaving at a seemingly comfortable 9:00 AM on a Friday morning. There was only one problem; the night before was the first gathering for Erasmus (a social club for students gathering in Europe). As always, things didn’t always go as planned the night before, and I ended up staying out until about 4 AM. Luckily, my daily alarm clock (my roommate) woke up at about 7 AM as he does every day, waking me up along with him. For once, being woken up was a welcomed event. I got all my things together and made the bus to the train station. Now one thing that I’ve grown out of is being late…when traveling. Nothing stresses me out more than missing a train, flight, or horseback caravan. So even though I ended up being 20 minutes early for the train, the 10 minutes I had to wait for the bus absolutely killed me. And if I thought I was late, the girls woke up 10 minutes before the train and by some miracle actually made it. Even though I had slept for 3 hours the night before, I couldn’t really sleep on the train for some reason. That would have been a problem in Illinois, but luckily I was in the Alps so the scenery was beautiful. Unfortunately I didn’t really take any pictures.
Upon arriving at the train station, I had to get in contact with Toby, the German guy at whose place I’d be staying. But first, we wanted to eat some authentic German food; so we went to Burger King. That unhealthy feeling after finishing with eating was just what I wanted. My cell phone wasn’t working, and every time that I tried to use a pay phone, that wouldn’t work either. Apparently I had to put 4 numbers in front of the 8 I already had, making the number 12 digits long. Finally we got in contact with the guy, but when he got to the train station, apparently he didn’t realize that there were two Burger Kings within 300 feet of each other. Obviously, neither did I, so I had to put another German guy on the phone to tell him that there were two. Once we met up with the guy, we got to discover the brilliant subway system in Munich. Honestly, it’s absolutely incredible. If you ever get lost in Munich, which all of us did, just find a subway station and go back to where you started. Also, the trains are free (the just don’t check) during Oktoberfest as well so you don’t need to buy tickets either! So on to the festival.
After we dropped off our stuff at Toby’s place, we headed out to the festival. Coming out of the train there was a man just saying friendly German phrases to people. It was actually pretty funny even though I couldn’t understand a word that he was saying. The station itself was packed. Once I walked out of the station, it was just utter chaos. People everywhere where wearing traditional Bavarian clothes. The girls were in those somewhat risqué low cut dresses and the guys were in goofy sweaters and leather knickers. Toby said that in some cases, men would have these things handed down through generations from their grandfathers’ grandfathers etc. Apparently, if you get a new pair of them, you’re supposed to pee on them so they look older. Once we got up to the fairgrounds, we were greeted with a flurry of flashing lights, people, and sadly, a little rain. But that rain wasn’t anything that the world’s best beer couldn’t fix. Immediately we tried to get into a tent with no success, so we jumped on this carousel which was equally crowded. There was a bar in the middle and no ponies, but it did spin. Being the efficient person I am, I wanted easy access to both my camera and my atm card in the same pocket. This proved to be a bad idea as I later found my atm card lying on the floor of the carousel. Yikes. But not to be scared by that, I went on to find the next place: The Bathroom. Now for all of you disappointed Cubs fans out there, I have one more thing for you to be disappointed about outside of us getting crushed in the playoffs: Wrigley Field didn’t invent the pee trough, Munich did. If you think about it though, it’s logical that the biggest beer drinking festival on earth would invent the most efficient way to pee.
Sorry. Anyways next we headed to the atm to pick up some cash, where my buddy Toby and I found a German girl, who after comparison, said that I looked more German than my German friend. Tack one up for Grandpa Mesch! Following this, we headed to our final destination of the night: the beer garden. It was just awesome. I started it off with the most delicious pretzel of my life, followed shortly after by the most enormous and delicious beer of my life. Check out the pictures, they’re there. So the rest of the night the girls and I just hung out making merriment, drinking delicious beer and eating half chickens. Ya, they are exactly what they sound like, but better. When the tents closed we headed to a bar where Kora was basically falling asleep on the table, so we didn’t stay for long. Genny made me delete those pictures so don’t be mad at me. After we left me basically walked across Munich looking for a cab, but just ended up taking the train back to Sheidplatz, which was the stop where Toby lived which I’ll never forget for the rest of my life. Without that knowledge, I probably would have spent the next night on a subway train. That night I slept on Toby’s floor with nothing but a blanket. It didn’t really bother me because after 3 hours of sleep the night before and a few beers, I could have slept on a bed of nails.
The next morning was surprisingly easy to wake up to. Toby gave us some water which must have helped because I felt fine, my tummy was just upset later for the German food I ate. So it was 9 when we woke up, and Toby kept trying to get the girls to head to the place they were planning on staying which was about 20 km outside of town. They ended up just asking Toby if they could stay there and lost their 100 Euro deposit. This was a fine maneuver in my eyes because it was just too big of a pain in the butt to go there at 1am. We immediately headed out to another day of Oktoberfest.
1 hour later, we found ourselves waiting in another line. After about 20 minutes, we had enough and went to find a tent. We arrived at a tent where I met some German guys my age. They all spoke English, like every other German on earth, and we started chatting. They taught me parts of a German drinking song, none of which I understood except for the part where they sang “Fau Schopf”, which sounded a lot like “Fo Sho”, so I obviously sang along beautifully there. So we hung out there for literally 7 hours. We made friends with everyone standing around us, and by the end of the night, I was an expert in German-English sign language. I had a sign for everything. For example, “I don’t speak German”: “I”-point to self, “don’t”-wave hands over each other and shake head , “speak”-make a talking motion with hand, “German”-point to German person’s mouth. Or I just said “Nein sprechen zie Deustch”. I think that’s right. Anyways, later in the night, I started getting a little board, so I figured I’d go for a little adventure on my own-bad idea. I ended up hanging out by a bumper car thing for a while with a German girl who didn’t speak any English or Italian - see pic. I then proceeded to a leave the festival, asking everyone where a subway station was. For the first time, I was treated poorly. When I asked someone for help, they told me to “Piss off”, in much worse words. I kindly reminded them of the result of WW2 and walked away. Not my proudest moment, but it felt good at the time. Somehow I ended up finding the subway station and rode the trains for about 30 minutes until I figured out how to get to my stop; Scheidplatz. Again, I’ll never forget. I made it back to my place and got to sleep on yet another incredibly comfortable floor. The girls showed up a little later, minus Kora and Kalee.
The next morning we woke up a little slower. We said goodbye to Toby and set out to find Kora and Kalee. We ran into them at the festival, where Kalee was missing her shoes. Apparently they flew off on a ride the night before. Anyways, we went around, took a few pics, this time actually getting into a tent. Check out the videos if you want to hear the music that they were playing. Just before leaving the festival we met a nice German man. We got to talking and he told us, as expected, that our antics were nothing new. He was proud of the festival and how it brought people together from all over the world. In all seemingly destructive things, I suppose there is always something good that comes from it.
On the train ride home, I was feeling a bit hungry, so I bought a half chicken, forgetting how messy it was. A German man sitting across from me kept making noises with his mouth, making it sound like he wanted some of my chicken, but it turned out that he just had fake teeth. There was a priest sitting next to me and he translated for me while I talked to the man. After a few hours, the priest and I got to talking. I informed him of my aspirations to join the Peace Corps and he told me that he was from Nigeria and that his village had just got electricity and clean water last year, but of late the water and electricity had been shut off. I told him about those straws that filter water for a year for 3 bucks a pop. Not bad. I sent him an email later about it, and he told me that as a favor in return, when I go to Rome, he’d give me and my friends a private tour of the Vatican! Look for that blog entry because I can guarantee that one will be awesome.
On a personal note, I miss all my friends a whole lot. I’ll be back December 14th, so start planning the party now. And also big news: I will be headed to Sub-Saharan Africa next year to serve in the Peace Corps! After a lot of thinking and praying, I think it’s the right decision for me. Please email me if you have any questions and I’ll be happy to fill you in on what else is happening in my life. PEACE
God bless,
Rich

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Photos

Carousel of Beer
It just kept spinning, and then when I got off so did the world...whoops.