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Published: October 2nd 2011
My Oktoberfest weekend was the best weekend I have had in Europe. I'm really glad that the festival met and exceeded my expectations. One of the reasons I came to Europe in the fall was to celebrate Oktoberfest, and I'm glad I got to spend it with my friends from Santa Clara.
I left for Munich on a Thursday night from Barcelona. I waited until midnight to take the Metro down to Plaza Catalonia and from there I took the night bus to the airport. The metro and the night bus were free, something I needed for the expensive weekend. I arrived at the airport at 1:30 A.M. and did some homework until my flight at 6:15 A.M. After waiting in the terminal for five hours, I was exhausted as I walked onto the plane.
I got one and a half hours of sleep that night because I went straight to the Oktoberfest tents when I landed. I met up with some IES girls at the airport and we took the S-Bahn to Munich City Center. I got off the Metro at the Theresienwiesse stop and beheld the world's greatest beer fest.
My cell phone wasn't working when
I arrived in Munich but I knew my friends were going to the Hofbräuhaus. I walked through the Oktoberfest site and was amazed at the size of the tents and the amount of people there. I learned that over 7 million people visit Oktoberfest each year. After I walked around the Hofbräuhaus for a while I finally found my friends. We partied in the tent for the whole morning and into the afternoon. My friend, Scott Johnson, and I chugged an entire liter of beer in one setting. We stood on top of a table in the tent and our friends cheered us on as we raced to reach the bottom of our steins.
I still can't get over the atmosphere of Oktoberfest. There were thousands of people in the Hofbräuhaus singing songs and dancing on tables. Every few minutes a guy would get on top of a table and chug a beer. Everyone in the tent would focus their attention on the person who was chugging his beer. If he finished his beer, the crowd would erupt and praise him. If he couldn't finish the beer, he got booed by his friends. One guy chugged six beers in
Steve Anderson
Lederhosen pants!the tent, I can't begin to imagine how hard that would be on the stomach.
That afternoon I wandered to the BMW museum. It was an interesting museum: full of fancy cars and some very cool exhibits. I also walked over to the Olympic Stadium that afternoon. I'm glad that I saw some different parts of Munich but it was not the smartest thing for me to do because I got separated from my group and didn't have any means of reconnecting with them.
After I went to the museum, I took the subway to Munich center. I remember that I walked into an Apple store, logged onto my facebook, and tried to get in contact with the people I was supposed to stay with that night. I sent them messages but they must've not been online at the time so I wasn't able to get a hold of them. I also emailed my parents asking them to send me a list of some German words because I was struggling to speak German. They responded to my email, but I had already left the Apple store by the time they responded.
I kept on walking around and
eventually went back to the Oktoberfest site. I continued to wander around looking for my friends for about two hours. I thought it would be fairly easy to run into some Santa Clara people but I underestimated the chaos of Oktoberfest. I eventually found Steven Anderson and some of my friends at the Hofbräuhaus. He was wearing Lederhosen pants and they were covered with stains from earlier that day. Steven took us to a place called Kafur. Kafur was kind of like a club in Oktoberfest: it was very exclusive and had music, but it was also like a restaurant because there were tables for groups of people to sit at and eat food. Steven's uncle had to pull some strings to get the six of us into Kafur, and it was well worth it. We stood on benches with some Germans and sang songs and drank beer. They spoke really good English and we were able to talk about the German language, the German and American songs playing, and other cultural things that interested us. Kafur was the highlight of my day on Friday. Two of the most memorable moments from that night were singing Frank Sinatra's "New York,
New York" and John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Road" with a room full of Germans.
That night I crashed in Steven Anderson's room in the Holiday Inn because I couldn't find my group that I was supposed to stay with. We managed to pack nine guys in a room that was meant for two people. There was not an extra inch of floor space in that room because five of us slept on the ground that night.
When I woke up we all went to the Oktoberfest site at 9:00 A.M. for round two. This time there were a lot more Santa Clara people there. I would guess that between 10-20% of the SCU junior class was at the Hofbräuhaus that morning gathered around three tables. It was really cool to see us all there and see my friends who were studying in other cities in Europe. In the afternoon, my friend Elouise and I went to the Deutsche Museum in Munich. It was a cool museum but there weren't too many exhibits in English so it was hard to fully appreciate it. After an hour of looking at exhibits, we walked to the Holiday Inn where
I finally met up with group who I was originally supposed to stay with. I put my backpack in our room at the Holiday Inn, after I had been carrying it with me everywhere I went on Friday and Saturday and then we went to dinner. We ended the night by walking around the Oktoberfest site. The Hofbräuhaus was extremely crowded so we weren't able to get inside. Instead, the girls went on the rides and we walked around the festival. I ate a bratwurst sausage which was really tasty, and a pork sandwhich the previous night. I really didn't need to eat too much that weekend because the drinks filled me up pretty well. I bought an Oktoberfest mug that night and then returned to the hotel.
The next morning my friends, Kelly and Madde, and I walked around Munich. I really like the clean feel of the city. It looked as though the city was fairly new because the sidewalks and streets were very clean and the buildings looked like they were in great shape. The buildings were also a little more bland than the buildings in Spain. They were beautiful to look at but they didn't
have as much detail in their architecture. The buildings looked like the were from Disneyland because the architecture was so similar.
The German language was really quite interesting. When I first took the subway that Friday I was thrown off by the differences in the German language. The voice on the PA system of the metro spoke in German, and I learned that the language was much colder and harsher than English or Spanish. In addition, it was almost scary because it sounded like the language was something from a communist country because of its stoic tone. I also learned that the German language is somewhat mathematical in its structure from a German man who I talked to at Kafer on Friday night. I wish I could speak some German because Munich was a great city to visit and I think I could've appreciated it more if I knew the language.
The return flight home was also pretty interesting. I coincidentally met my friends Emily and Connor at the gate in the terminal for Barcelona. We arrived at our gate two hours before the flight and struck up some conversations while we were waiting for our flight, which
was scheduled to leave at 1:15. At 1:00, we realized that the plane wasn't boarding and we asked the attendants what was going on. They told us that our plane was scheduled to leave at a different gate on the other end of the airport and that it was leaving in 15 minutes. We sprinted through that airport so fast so that we could catch our flight. We also probably looked like the funniest people in the terminal as we were sprinting with our dirty clothes and beer mugs on our backpacks. Luckily, we made it back to Barcelona in one piece.
I'm really glad I went to Oktoberfest this weekend. It was really expensive, I hope the most expensive weekend I will have while I'm abroad, but totally worth it. I think this festival is something that everyone should partake in at least once in their lives and I will definitely recommend it to my friends one year below me at SCU. This was surely a weekend I will never forget.
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Betty Heaton
non-member comment
Munich:)))
1985 I/we loved our time in Germany, especially, Munich. Your reflections and commentary and photos, including your other blogs, create a great picture! Thank you!