Oktoberfest - Let The Festivities Begin!

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Well firstly I have to say Oktoberfest was fantastic!! So much better than I thought it would be for a non-beer drinker like me!

I got up early, quickly packed and caught the tube to Stamford Brook to met Suz and the boys plus Mel outside the tube station. Me and Mel grabbed some refreshments for the long journey ahead of us and then made our way to the Globetrotter Inn to get ourselves signed in.

We had a bit of a snack for lunch and the boys started drinking their Strongbow. Before we knew it, it was time to jump on our coach and make our slow journey towards Munich.
After a brief health and safety message, and instructions on how to ‘double bag’ if you’re feeling sick, we were on our way to Munich - with and expected 16 hours (minimum) of continuous travel to look forward to!!

We headed towards Dover and thought we’d have a few drinks to ease our way through the long trip, only to be told a short while later that the toilet on board didn’t work!!

We jumped on the ferry at Dover, checked out the infamous white Dover cliffs and headed across to Calais, France 2 hours later. We decided to stop consuming anymore liquids after the ferry, as the treat of no toilet was just a bit to scary for us.

Once in Calais we picked up our second driver, changed our watches back 1 hour and were forced to go up the front the bus, say your name, something about you that you won’t know by looking at you and a joke. Of course I had to use the ‘two guys in a burning house…”

We drove through France and Luxemburg then into Germany, having a rest break about every 4 hours. We watched a reasonably good movie on the way down called ‘Basic’, and then tried to get as much sleep as possible, which didn’t amount to much.


We arrived at our campsite in Munich at about 6.30am (local time) 19 hours after we left London!
Ally and I found our tent, No. 41, unpacked our stuff and had a little bit of a lie down for half an hour. We jumped back on the coach and headed into the city for a walking tour of Munich with our tour guide Owen.

We saw the Glockenspiel, and waited for it to do its 12pm show, which I was especially excited about.
Owen had warned us that it was not all it was necessarily cracked up to be, and perhaps he was right. After 15-20 minutes of similar stuff, it did get slightly mundane, but I’m still very happy that we stayed and watched, ever if others were not quite so impressed.

We went to the church with the ‘salt and pepper shakers’ called Frauenkirche, and were able to have a good look around inside. Next stop was the Hofbrauhaus Beer house, which is apparently the same beer hall that Hitler used to go to all those years ago.

We sat outside in the beer garden and ordered ourselves a large stein each. Two steins later we jumped on the U-bahn and headed into the Oktoberfest festival.
We had a few more steins in the Lowenbrau and Hofbrau tents plus the schnapps tent and at some point, I managed to loose everyone in the crowds.

Thankfully, two American guys found me, Walter and Joe, and looked after me for the rest of the night. They took me up the ferris wheel and around the festival until Oktoberfest closed for the night.

They tried to get me back to my campground via the U-bahn but, we had trouble working out which is the right station. So we jumped on a train that we through was going the right way.

We needed to swap train lines along the way, but while we were waiting for the next train to arrive, we were kicked out of the station saying that was the last train for the night.

I had no idea where we were, and we seemed to be walking forever. We caught a taxi to their car which was in a parking building somewhere. We finally found it, and I was able to sleep in the back of their car, while they were stuck in the front seats.

We apparently got kicked out of the parking building and I got woken up at some stage as we were driving along saying does any of this look familiar?
I saw a sign to the Zoo and remembered that the campground was next to it, and finally got back at about 7.30am.

People were starting to get up and have breakfast for the day. I managed to get the guys some free breakfast for all their troubles before saying thank you and goodbye.

I might pay a little more attention to where everyone is next time! …

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Photos

The Group
Overlooking the imfamous white Dover cliffs

Prost! (Cheers)
Mel, Ally & Hanz with the offical large steins at Hofbrauhous

The Glockenspiel
The tweety bird at the end makes it all worth it :)

Hanging Out at Okotberfest
Hanz, Owen, Mel and 'Frank'

Frauenkirche
The 'Salt and Pepper Shakers'

Building Up Our Arm Muscles
Hanz & Mel

Lowenbrau
One of the 14 Beer Halls

Oktoberfest at Night
From the top of the Ferris Wheel

Comments

[db]

Glockenspiel
You should bring Mel back to New Zealand with you. Rock'n roll, man. Anyway, is it just me, or are German words super-fun to pronouce?

[Hanz]

haha, well i can ask her, but i don't think she has any plans on going any where soon! - perhaps you should come over here???... German names are awesome - that is until your abilty to get home depends on them...