Oktoberfest: A Fest in Oktober (and September)

Hi everyone, it's me, Bridget!  I'm back from Oktoberfest!

I took a bus to Munich with Gene and Tara's friends Dustin and Alexa.  Tara and Gene traded me for Dustin and Alexa's cane Cooper for the day:

The bus left Vicenza at 2 AM yesterday, and we arrived in Munich around 8:45.  I am sorry to say that my first impression of Germany was one of utmost terror.  I was asleep on the bus, and a baby cried and woke me up.  I looked out the window and saw that it was very dark and foggy out.  And then I realized that ninety percent of what I thought was sky was actually A GIGANTIC SCARY BLACK MOUNTAIN SHROUDED IN FOG.  Actually we might have been in Austria.

Once we were in Munich, we took the U-Bahn (that's what they call their subway) to Marienplatz, which is the big important square around there.  We wandered around.  One thing I noticed: Germans like to garnish their meals with tomato slices.  Another thing: they like bikes.

They also like sausage:

And they like to pamper their dogs.  Here is a doggy boutique with fancy collars and outfits:

We found this wedding:

Some more pictures from the morning:

Then we went to Oktoberfest.

Oktoberfest is the biggest fair in the world, and 2010 is its bicentennial.  It has all the things smaller fairs have--food that's bad for you,overpriced souvenirs, rickety-looking rides in garish colors--but it has MORE of them.  It is also all about the beer.  People arrive in the morning hoping to be able to get into one of the beer tents, which open at 10 AM.  I spent about two hours waiting in front of beer tents with Dustin and Alexa, but we didn't actually get in one.  Which was fine with me.  Here are some giant pretzels:

Oktoberfest was super crowded.  When we were waiting at beer tents we were surrounded with people speaking German, English, Italian, and French.  They were all pushing against each other, and a lot of them were smoking and/or drinking.  In the States this would be a GIGANTIC FIRE HAZARD.  In Germany it's just one of those things.   This is the closest I came to getting a good picture of the crowd:

It's pretty awful to be a short person in a big crowd, because you have to hold your head up so you don't get smothered.  What made it worse was that Germans are tall.  No wonder they thought they were the master race! (That's a joke by the way.)

Gigantic crowds mean lots of trash, too.  By the afternoon, you couldn't walk without kicking shards of glass--mostly from shattered beer steins--along with you.  I didn't take pictures of the broken glass because it was too crowded to take a useful picture of the ground.  I didn't take pictures of the restrooms (many stalls, one tiny sink) because it's shady to take pictures in a public restroom.

One thing I could not avoid noticing was that a whole lot of people were actually wearing lederhosen like it was totally normal.  I took what pictures I could, which meant that they are mostly from behind:

The female equivalent of lederhosen is the barmaid dress.  Unfortunately, I got no good pictures of those.  Most of the color combinations were all wrong anyhow.

Here are more pictures of Oktoberfest:

I bought this thing for Tara and Gene.  There were stalls selling them everywhere.  They come in all different sizes, and with lots of different words on them...this one, I'm told, says "Greetings from Oktoberfest 2010".  People were wearing them around their necks.  It smells like gingerbread.  I'm pretty sure it's cookie.




If it looks like a cookie, and it smells like a cookie, and it acts like a cookie...it's a cookie.

 The bus left Munich at 8 PM and I was back in Vicenza by 2 AM this morning.  Then I went to sleep on my lovely pull-out sofa. 

Here is a video of one of the rides at Oktoberfest.  On this one, attendants whisk you up a conveyor belt, then you climb a bunch of stairs and slide down a crazy rickety slide.