GERMANY!!!!!! Oktoberfest: The making of a real man

28/9- Arrival Lubec
We excitedly got off the Ryanair flight to catch our first glimpse of Germany. It was Cold, Grey, German. There were very intimidating police officers standing on the tarmac watching us and more of them waiting in the distance with a firetruck that looked more like a tank than anything else. Outside the airport with met with Jules' friend Jacob who helped us get to our hostel via bus and his car. We drove through the lush green Lubec countryside and through the city streets that made me homesick for San Francisco and Humboldt, with Jacob commenting on various things that we were passing. The parks we passed were huge and the architecture of the city was absolutely great.

Streets of Lubec. Notice the grey.

A mass exodus of small German children from the building greeted our arrival at the hostel. They came out in seemingly never ending waves and took up positions around the building playing tag, table tennis or walking to the street. Inside the building, there were more of them milling about. We surmised that we were the only people (other than the maintenance crew) staying in the hostel who o were older than 12 (this was proven wrong when we met two fellow travelers who looked equally distressed by the large number of children constantly swarming through the halls of the hostel). We quickly stowed our bags and embarked on a quest for the two essentials we were all looking for: Drink and Food (in no particular order).

Germany believes in safe fruit.

While wandering through the streets, we stopped at a famous sweet shop to sample Lubec’s specialty: marzipan. 3 words: Super Amazingly Delicious. It was in this shop that I realized that I would have a difficult time switching out of French mode well enough to use the smattering of German phrases that I’d studied particularly for the trip. My conversations were made up of a combination of French and English….neither of which are similar to German at all. After walking through the light rain and the cobbled German back streets, we found a very authentic German looking restaurant that was exactly what we were looking for. There were giant flaming torches outside the building, and a painting of a dragon snake around one of them. The restaurant was giant, dark and brick, looking as though it could just as easily been some sort of medieval torture chamber. You can see why we were so attracted to it, im sure. Inside the restaurant was completely different. Tables were packed and the atmosphere was nothing less than jovial. My meal was thick, hearty and very wonderfully German (consequently, so was the waitress who served it). Upon the suggestion of our waitress, we ordered our first German drinks- those ½ litres of amber goodness definitely won’t soon be forgotten. We ate and we drank slowly, enjoying each bite, knowing that it would be difficult to find such a hearty meal in Aix where everything comes in much smaller, lighter portions. After the restaurant, we went to a nice little loungey cafe where we drank and talked some more. By this point the 5 hours collective sleep I’d had in the last 3 days was catching up with me and I was getting quite tired. The waitress saw this and brought me a giant coffee and another ½ litre to help me wake up. Problem solved. We chatted there for the better part of 2 hours, talking to the waitress, Jules’ friend who had met us at the airport and was showing us around, and the other patrons of the lounge. Our conversation was frequently interrupted by this gigglingly energetic little girl who would run up to our table and hand one of us her doll and then run away laughing to herself. She’d always return to take the doll back with a huge smile on her face, trying to hold back waves of laughter. This exchange seemed to be the funniest thing in the world to her and eventually she had us laughing too, even though her humour was way over our heads. In the proper mood and having waited long enough, we made our way to a nearby dance club where we figured we’d try our hands at the German club scene. The cover charge afforded us free shots and Tequila was the drink of choice. Downstairs, we danced to quite possibly one of the best mixes of Funk, Motown, 80’s and 90’s that I’ve heard in a long time. The dance floor was packed and people seemed to know the words to every song the DJ spun. The Funk and Motown excited me the most as it was very popular with the German crowd that was there. There was a group of lads running laps around the outside of the dance floor and dancing like madmen in the middle of the crowd, spinning their matching ties around their heads. My curiosity piqued, I started talking to them and found that they were the elite of an English drinking team and had just returned triumphant from Oktoberfest and were now celebrating at the club before their flight out the next day. We danced until 3 or 4 in the morning, then, completely exhausted and giggling like school children, we started the trek back to the hostel, completely unsure of where any of us were going. It was an Amazing night.

The morning after.
The morning after did not have the same magic as the night before. I rolled out of bed early that afternoon, showered and returned to the bedroom where a few people were still sleeping. Those of us who were awake, wearily made our way to the Hostel’s free breakfast. The hall with the free breakfast was brimming with shouting, laughing, loud, loud, loud, loud German children. We ate our breakfast in silence, each of us with our heads bowed over our own large mugs of coffee, cursing the children around us.

German transportation: Frighteningly Superior in every way.

Its so German!

That day we made a brief stop in Hamburg, and then arrived in Berlin’s main Hauptbanhoff train station. It was there that the immensity and absolute organizational prowess of the German culture hit me. Trains came and went and crowds moved with such clockwork precision that we almost didn’t know what to do. Signs with train schedules and maps were posted everywhere and all were very clear and easy to read and understand….something that really caught us American’s off guard. Having grown weary of traveling with such a large group, two others and I headed off on our own to tour Berlin and find our own lodgings. We found a really great guy on Couchsurfing who gave us his couch to crash on. He had called me almost immediately, and being a big advocate for the Couchsuring community, he was really excited to host us at his place. We agreed to meet him at his place at 7 and took off to explore the historic Berlin before then. Leaving the train station we met another American who spoke a fair amount of German and joined the 3 of us. We wandered around Berlin looking at the sights slowly making our way to the Brandenburg Gate, Reichstag, and Berlin Wall. Berlin’s cosmopolitan diversity was amazing to see and I realized that I could easily live in such a lively city. We heard the crowd before we saw it. Madonna’s hit song got louder and louder as we approached the Brandenburg Gate. When we finally got to it we saw the giant clusters of speakers pumping out the 80’s hit to a crowd of brightly colored spandex wearing Rollerbladers. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who associated the Cold War and Nazi Germany with Madonna, Spandex and Rollerblading as the local German government had decided that this historic meeting point of East and West Germany and home to Hitler’s historic government headquarters would make a perfect location to host an international Rollerblading marathon.

The Path of the Berlin Wall (1961-1989)

So as we walked around the gate, followed the path of the Berlin Wall and started at the architectural giant that is the Reichstag and memorials surrounding it, we were accosted by men and womyn in skin tight multicolored spandex rollerblading around or dancing to the blaring house remixes of Madonna, Paula Abdul and other 80’s hits that one would only expect to hear in a very stereotypical gay club. We finally left the area and went to the Holocaust memorial that was near by. Fighting through the rainbow sea of spandex on wheels took us 45 mins to walk the 3 blocks to the memorial. The Holocaust memorial was breathtaking and I got lost in it for quite a while.

The entrance of the Holocaust Memorial

Walking between the giant cement pillars made me loose track of the sky and everything else around me. It was one of the most powerful pieces of artwork that I’ve ever experienced. We tried to find the bunker where Hitler died but after searching about 5 mins for it, we gave up and started to head back to the train station to meet our couchsurfer. We got lost for a bit but eventually ended up at the right train stop and made it to his apartment. On the way we crossed the barrier where the Berlin Wall once stood and although it was the same neighborhood, it was clear which side was once east and which was West Berlin. Andre, the guy we were surfing had a really cool apartment and also had another surfer (Jazmine from Australia) staying with him. He showed us around his very non-touristy part of Berlin that night. We spent that night at a really cool art gallery opening and seeing 2 indie German bands perform at an awesome little bar. Had we not been couchsurfing, we never would have seen this underground side of Berlin and this experience forever cemented my love and devotion to couchsurfing. We left Andre’s early the next morning for our train to Munich and the world’s greatest festival that awaited us there.

Train station. Notice clock (this was one of many): Germans don't believe in tardiness

Oktoberfest: building a tolerance too expensive for foreign students in Europe.

Welcome to Oktoberfest!

Follow that beer carriage!

Really, Really Big Madness

Oktoberfest was madness. Really Really Really Big madness. Covering the festival grounds is a giant amusement park, food vendors, Giant statues, a monster truck arena, beer gardens and of course, the Beer Tents. These tents are giant. Erected in a mad 8 weeks and taken down in just 6 wks before and after the festival these very permanent looking structures are designed to hold a full kitchen, a giant orchestra, many bathrooms and over 7,500 rowdy drunks each. Long wooden tables fill each tent and beer enthusiasts fill each table. As these enthusiasts do what they love to do, a traditional Bavarian band on a raised platform over the crowd pumps out some of the best music to drink to- Bavarian music, with the rare cover of some American classic rock or crowd created drinking song. When the music plays, people stand up on benches and on tables waving their steins in the air singing along, uncaring of the lyrics or of the beer that’s sloshing out of their swaying steins. The music wasn’t the only thing that got people to stand on the benches, it seemed like we were always being pulled up to the benches for some reason or another.

Germans on Tables

This is what excitement looks like

We got into Munich, found our campsite (big field of tents in the middle of a stadium a little outside of town) and made our way to our first night of the Festival as fast as we could. We got to the festival in the evening and bee lined to the first tent we could find. Being that it was dinnertime and we didn’t have reservations we had to forage for seats in one of the beer gardens until we could make it into the tents. The beer gardens and the tents are the only places in the festival where one can buy and drink beer. The Gardens are outdoors and are usually attached to the tents and run by the same breweries (each tent is run by a different brewery). The beer gardens are made up of long wooden tables where you wait around for people to vacate and quickly fill in the empty spots. We were told that finding seats in any garden would be difficult but as soon as we walked into the first one, an old German couple and their friends waved us over to join them at their table. We ordered our first beers of the festival and some giant Bavarian pretzels (we hadn’t eaten in a while).

That pretzel was bigger than my head.

These pretzels were nearly rock hard, larger than my head and delicious! The 3 of us worked our way through 2 of these pretzels and a few steins. The old Germans sitting with us gave us the lowdown on the festival and taught us about the drinking traditions that we’d be abiding by, the most important of which being how to “Cheers” one’s fellow drinkers. When a person at the table says “PROST!” (Literally meaning “Health” and the German equivalent to Cheers), we were told to be sure to raise our steins and, most importantly, make eye contact with those we were clinking steins with. The consequence of not making eye contact is too horrible to mention (also, I promised my parents to keep this bog as G-rated as possible due to the variety of people who read it). We eventually did make it into a Tent that first night and had an absolute blast. We woke the next day in our tent, cleaned ourselves up as best we could and hurried back to the festival. It was around 11 am when we reached and we were hungry to get something in our stomachs. We entered the festival following a traditional horse drawn carriage through the city that was delivering the day’s beer to one of the breweries. It was Grand! Breakfast was a roasted chicken and another round of steins. Delicious! These Chickens were roasted in butter and served with mashed potatoes…..mmmmmm. We had various types of pretzels and other German goodies. We spent the day wandering around the festival exploring its many wonders. We met people from around the world and had a blast looking at all the Germans in their traditional dress. We learned that this festival is one of the largest German cultural festivals in the world and that the Bavarians take great pride in their traditional lederhosen and other outfits. The Tents, food, dress, drinks and culture of the festival was all kept to traditional Bavarian standards and this is one of the things that I appreciated most. There were families all over the festival, with each member of the family in traditional German dress. There were also tourists and travelers from around the world enjoying everything the festival had to offer. Every so often we’d see a group of people dressed up in matching drinking costumes (Roman gladiators, Australian men in matching orange dresses, a group of Irish people in all green matching outfits with challenges to other drinkers printed on the back of their shirts). We spent the whole day there and that evening we met up with the rest of the people we had been traveling with, partied until the festival shut down that night, then absolutely exhausted, we made the long trek back to the campground ending another day at the festival.

The next day (our last day in Munich), we decided to explore the Munich outside the festival. Surprisingly it wasn’t hard for me to leave the festival as I am sure that I couldn’t have withstood another day in the unbridled insanity that is Oktoberfest. We saw the old parts of Munich, marveling at the architecture of old Cathedrals and of city plazas. It turns out that Jesus is really popular round those parts. Each Cathedral seemed larger and grander than the last and eventually I couldn’t stand to walk through another one of them. We ended up taking a break in a plaza where various street performers were either setting up or taking down. We plopped ourselves down in the middle of the plaza right in front of two old men who had started to play some jazz.
One of them played an upright bass and the other played the Clarinet. They were absolutely amazing. As we sat there on the floor watching them play, a crowd formed around us and eventually a small child squeezed his way to the front, and much to the amusement of the two old men and the gathered crowd, started dancing to the music. Every time the men stopped playing the young boy would shoot them and accusing dance and when they started again he would clap and start dancing again. They played all the jazz classics and played many of their own pieces as well. We sat there relaxing and listening to them for nearly an hour and a half and I ended up buying a great cd of theirs that I listen to nearly every day. That evening we went to have a last hoorah Oktoberfest and boarded the train back to Lubec to fly home the next day. What an amazing Trip.



*I tried to keep this as G rated as possible....Besides, if i didn't keep it edited, i'd have too much to write about.
**For those of you who have yet to figure out the metric system (this includes me) i will provide a handy dandy conversion: 1 litre = 2.113 pints........thats right. 2 pints.
***Once again, im sorry for finishing and posting this blog so long after the fact