oktoberfest

 I am back in Athens after 3 days of being in Munich, Germany for the world reknowned Oktoberfest and a little bit of sight-seeing around the city. Me and Julia left Friday morning from Athens at about 4a to catch our flight into Munich. After a quick check into our hostel we quickly figured out the U/S- Bahn system (which is very similar to NYC's with less stops and chaos) and headed over to Oktoberfest. It wasn't hard to find- just follow the crowds of dirndl and lederhosen-clad people (see below for examples of the style).

The top right picture is of one of the entrances. There are multiple ones because it is such a huge festival. We were thoroughly overwhelmed by the tents and sheepishly asked one of the waitresses if we were allowed to just sit down or if there is special etiquette for the event. Most of the waiters speak enough English to serve us beer, bring us to a seat if there is one available, and to kick us out when they decide we have slowed down too much and are not bringing in enough profit to deserve a seat anymore. Our first tent was Augustiner Brau which we also have concluded to be the best beer out of the ones we tried throughout the weekend. 

Each tent is unique both inside and outside. And they aren't really tents. They are more like Harry Potter halls. They are solid built wooden buildings that are very unlike what you imagine when you think of a tent. Augustiner's interior was kind of  Christmasy but I don't think it was supposed to be Christmas-themed. As far as I know...

This weekend was evidently "italian weekend" so if the people at your table didn't speak German than they only spoke Italian. At our first table, we were seated with 6 italians and a Japanese couple that just moved to France and could speak a little bit of English but were quiet for most of the time. This picture is of our first beer at Oktoberfest- a very exciting time for us. Our table was fun even though there were a lot of blank looks and obvious confusion due to language barriers. Eventually we all just kept laughing anways, most likely for different reasons though.

They sell ginormous pretzels to soak up all the beer. 

The vendor lady posed so I could take a picture of her :)

We got kicked out of that haus after almost 2 beers (let that be noted that they are liters, almost 3 of the puny bottles that we are used to in America) and walked around the festival area. The only thing we went on was the ferris wheel and the views were AMAZING!!!

 

The first is a view of the entire festival from the top- well, as much as could fit in the photo.  The next one is of me and Julia on the ferris wheel.

 This is one of the other tents that we were in. I forget the name of it. But I really loved the decorations in it. All the streamers. It's so awesome to see in person though- pictures are so limited. And every haus is so different.

Some of the gingerbread hearts that Oktoberfest sells all over the festival. 

 So Friday we did Oktoberfest, got back to our hostel around 7p and went right to bed because we were so exhausted from getting up at 3:30a and being at the festival for the majority of the day. Saturday we actually toured the city. We visited the Deutches Museum which is mostly aeronautic technology and different mechanical/engineering things. I would've preferred an art museum or something but we don't speak much german so we went with the museum that was on the train system map.

After the museum I got a durum doner which is like a Greek gyro in Munich and then we headed to the zoo. Everything was way more open and it made me feel like Rochester's zoo is very bad for the animals. This zoo didn't have any of the chain link fences that all the Rochester animals are in. Most have a pretty good sized roaming area and sometimes it seems that the animals could easily walk out of their area. For some reason they don't though. Anyways, I'm convinced we should free all the animals in Rochester's zoo because it is way too small for them.

Last thing before heading back to the hostel on Saturday was a trip to the Olympic Stadium in Munich. It was cold and rainy and I was wearing sandals so once we got to the pool we sat for as long as we could to avoid going back out. We were too cold and unprepared for the weather to see the stadium so we agreed that we were satisfied with getting to see the olympic sized pool.

Sunday we got up at 8:30a to make sure that we were able to get into a tent at Oktoberfest. We were at a table with an older italian couple with whom we tried to talk to but after about a minute we realized this would not work. On the other side of our table was six older Russian men who also had extremely limited English but still fed me lots of meat as "a gift from Russia". Two creepy German guys joined the table after a bit and later we ended up having to use some sly maneuvering to lose them amongst the crowds.

This is a super long blog thing but still I feel like I have barely been able to give a good account of all the things we saw and people we met. Despite the creepy drunken men and language barriers, I'd say this past weekend was pretty awesome.

More pictures on my facebook :)