Oktoberfest

This past weekend I went to Oktoberfest. To say that Oktoberfest is eventful is an understatement. This weekend was also "Italian weekend" aka Lauren and her girl friends should be very careful of the super aggressive italian men. The trip started off a little rough. My flight was at 3:30 pm on Thursday but due to the France air strike all of the flights were either being delayed or canceled. After waiting for about 2 hours, I finally boarded the plane and then we sat on the plane for another hour before finally taking off. Lufthansa was a great airline though and I luckily was given an emergency exit seat so I was able to sleep the entire time. I met up with all of my friends at The Wombat, the hostel we were staying at for the weekend. We then went to Der Pschorr for dinner where we had made a reservation for about 15 people.


On Friday we woke up around 10 a.m. since we had made a table reservation back in April for a table in the Hippodrom tent. We went to our table at 12 and were informed that we had a 300 euro voucher to spend however we wanted. Thus, craziness began. Each tent has brewed its own type of beer so they all have different tastes (and are also all much stronger than normal beer). We had a great time ordering all sorts of platters to split for lunch and made friends with all the germans around us. About every 20 minutes the older men sitting next to us would start singing and cheers our glasses. In the afternoon we decided to explore the outdoors and went on some of the roller coasters. Why roller coasters and drinking are at one venue, I do not know, but I was determined to ride roller coasters no matter what. I went on the huge Ferris wheel, the log flume, and a roller coaster that has left my arms covered in bruises because it was throwing us around so much. The picture below is the view of Oktoberfest and all the tents from the Ferris wheel.

On Saturday we woke up at 6 a.m. to get showered and get to the tents. It was a mad house. There were thousands of people scrambling to try to get into a tent and to get a table. If you do not have a table, you can't get beer. The tents each fit about 5,000 but they are completely full by 9 a.m. and trust me, people are not planning on leaving anytime before 2 p.m. We luckily found a table in Hofbrau house, which is the main Oktoberfest tent and probably the rowdiest. We stayed there all day and hung out with all the other Duke kids that were there. Everyone was standing on the benches and dancing and singing along to Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline", Bruce Channel's "Hey Baby", and some german song that I knew the tune to by the end.

View of the Hofbrau tent