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Published: September 18th 2010
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It's just after 6am here. I have jet lag (still!) so I am writing this up before we get up in 20 mins to get ready for Oktoberfest. We want to be present for the tapping of the keg and do not have a reservation. We are hoping to see it anyway.
Yesterday was good. We slept in. I know that sleeping in is just a normal vacation thing for most vacationers, but we rarely do it. There are too many things to see! But we were exhausted enough that we did sllep in and it was fabulous. Once we rolled out of bed, we visited a nearby bakery for late breakfast goodies (the staff was very rude) and headed to the U-bahn.
Our destination was the Olympic Park. We tooled around there, visited the stadium and tower, and then trekked over to the BMW museum. We thought the price of admission was too steep, so we instead ate a late lunch there. Our food took way too long which pretty much meant that we could do very little after. It was thankfully still light out. We decided to head over to the English Garden to check out their beer garden.
The oompa band stopped playing shortly after we arrived. We ordered two liter beers of Hoffbrau and found a place to sit. We were initially sitting alone. The very loud group at the neighboring table invited us over; a pair of Aussies and a bunch of German college kids. We had a very, very good an entertaining time talking to them. We asked them important things like, "Why do Germans love David Hasselhoff?" (they don't) and established that the A-team was a great show. Jer and I finished our liters and bid the adieu.
We wanted to visit Spatenhaus, the Spaten beer hall in town. Rick Steves' entry on Spatenhaus warned of its snobbery--being close to the opera district--and he was not lying. All of the empth tables were reserved and the few open seats were being "saved" by latecomers. Yeah, right.
Only a little discouraged (Jer can drinkSpaten any time at unpretentious Feierabend AND enjoy Andechs while we are in Munchen), we headed into Marienplatz. The place was INSANE with revelers already getting their drink and party on before today's keg tapping. CRAZY. The nice thing though, was that the atmosphere was happy. People were glad to be there, to be experiencing the excitement of Oktoberfest,so their masses were not annoying as one might fear.
We stopped in briefly at Donisl, a beer hall that serves Hacker Pschorr but they were also stuffed to the gills with people and reserved tables. I suggested we walk down and check out Augustiner. I remembered the hall being huge the last time we were here, and it tends to be a favorite of locals more than tourists. My hunch paid off. The waitress prompted us to sit at the end of an already occupied table. We ordered to mas Radlers (Jer's was by accident, he thought I'd ordered a dunkle), food, and enjoyed ourselves. Our table mates congratulated us on our recent nuptials and told Jeremiah that he would "become a baby" in nine months because someone spilled beer toward him. Haha!
When we returned to the flat Erika invited us to join her at a zombo party she'd help set up. She just wanted to make an appearance, have a beer, and return home. We were knackered but up for it. The party wasn't yet hopping but appeared to be well underway when we were leaving.
The alarm clock just told me the time. Looks like it's time to start again!
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