Author's Note: This is going to be heavily censored. As if you needed that warning.
Any fans of Beerfest will know that no, my blog hasn't taken a perverse turn, and that the blog title is in reference to the wisdom of Great Gam-Gam. Anytime October rolls around, Beerfest quotes fly through the Brouse household like swear words in Ireland. Some people view Oktoberfest as a "once in a lifetime experience" (kinda like how we did with Tomatina), not willing to deal with the debauchery more than once. The Brouses are not those people. Not only is Munich an awesome city; the experience of Oktoberfest is just too much fun to NOT repeat. And Oktoberfest with my bestie from Chicago and her husband? It's on like Donkey Kong.
Our flight schedule this year wasn't the greatest, but it was infinitely better than last year's shenanigans of flying overnight via London to Munich Memmigen and then taking an hour and a half shuttle to Munich city center. Since our flight was at 6:30am on Wednesday morning, we drove down to Malaga on Tuesday night and got a room at the Holiday Inn Express by the airport. Actually finding the hotel was a bit of a fiasco in itself, as it didn't register on our GPS or on Elliot's updated iPhone with iMaps. We drove past the same Toys 'R Us half a dozen times, and I was about to go on a murderous rampage starting with Geoffrey the Giraffe when we finally found the green Holiday Inn sign. We had a quick bite to eat before settling down for basically a nap before our flight.
We had a stop in Madrid, but our flight from Malaga got in early, so we had a little bit of time to kill before our next flight to Munich. El was able to snooze on the first flight, and I was able to catch a few zzzz's before landing in Munich International Airport. Our flight arrived at 11:15am, and Annie Mitch and Eric's flight from Dublin arrived 30 minutes prior. When we collected our luggage (basically huge, empty suitcases to fill with steins), we walked through the doors and Annie was holding a sign that said "BROUSE" and was decorated with drawings of beer mugs.
Anne and I have been friends since freshman year of high school, when we were 14 and obviously knew it all. She and I played softball together our first three years and became great friends. We really got close the summer after graduation, when Anne, me, Ashley, Kristin and Krystal spent every day together. We all became best friends that summer and have been best friends ever since. We've been through a lot together, have countless memories, and always pick up where left off when we're reunited. The funny thing is that everyone is so unique and different from each other; it really makes for a motley crew of best friends. But somehow it works, and I love those 4 girls like family.
When Annie Mitch (I use Anne, Annie and Annie Mitch interchangeably) and I are together, we laugh nonstop. Our personalities are super similar, so we share the same values and perception of the world. The fact that she had a sign with beer mugs on it should probably prove how well she knows me. We laughed and gave each other a huge hug and hitched a bus to Munich's train station. She also brought me bags of Pizzeria Pretzel Combos, my most favoritest snack that I can't find in Spain. Um yeah, I opened a bag immediately
The train station (basically the city center close to our hotel) was about a 20 minute ride by bus, and the driver graciously drove past Delaney's (Emily's friend who was with them) and the Dean's hotels so they could see where they needed to walk next. We all went to our respective hotels and agreed to clean up and meet up in Marienplatz to buy steins and lederhosen.
We were able to book the Best Western Cristal on Schwalenstrasse (spelling is a guess), just a stone's throw away from Oktoberfest. It was about 2 blocks closer to the fest than last year's Hotel Prasident, and we had to book in January to get a room. All hotels in that area are CRAZY expensive that time of year, but we had decided to pay a little bit more for the convenience of being stumbling distance from Das Boot. The hotel was nice though and surprisingly had A/C, which came in handy for the unseasonably warm German weather we had (not complaining).
Around 2, we all met up in front of the glockenspiel of Marienplatz and grabbed a table inside the same restaurant we had dinner at last year (with the Blue Mooners). We naturally ordered up a round of beer. Unfortunately (fortunately?), they were only serving beers in the liter stein glasses, so we all were a little bit saucy after just one heavy, German beer. We gorged ourselves on conversation, laughs, potato salad and that sweet, golden nectar before walking to the stein store. It turns out that Wednesday was a bank holiday, and ALL shops were closed. We noted the hours of the stein store, made a mental note to go back on Friday, and searched for the store where we had purchased our lederhosen and dirndl. Considering we had just stumbled upon it last year, it was a miracle that we found this place again. It too was closed, but it would be open at 10am the next morning. We all agreed to go before our tent reservation at noon so we could all look the part in the Hofbrau Haus.
Down but not defeated, and after taking a group Gangnam style picture in Marienplatz, we decided to check out the reason for our visit: to find Barry Badrinath. Or get sour on some krauts, either one.
You could hear the fest from far away, and Elliot somehow remembered how to get there from our hotel (E= MC Hammered?). The weather was beautiful, everyone was in the spirit (or drinking spirits), and the sounds of the carnival rides and beer halls rang through the air. For those of you who didn't read last year's Toni Kukoc-filled adventure, you already know that you can't be served beer unless you are sitting at a table in a beer tent or beer garden. The only "public" bar is this outdoor one right by the fest's entrance, and it rotates beer sponsors every year. Hoping to cash in the tokens he had from last year's Paulaner adventure, El was disappointed that this year's beer was Hacker and his money was no good there. We first found a spot right by the bathrooms, where Eric and Anne made best friends with an older German guy and Prost'ed with him a few minutes. Then the realization that we were standing by a bathroom sunk in (or STUNK IN! RIM SHOT!), and we quickly grabbed the standing table a group of people had just left. We ended up staying and drinking there until the sun started going down, making conversations with the random German people around us. Emily struck up a conversation with a young German guy whose friends kept trying to leave (we must've said goodbye to them no fewer than 3 times); Elliot made Eric talk to a German guy and his 7 year old daughter who just waltzed right up to our table (for some reason, even though Elliot speaks more German than Eric, El got it in his head that Eric was fluent and would tell random German people there Eric spoke Deutsche), and Anne and I sang the Wild Rover with some curly-haired guy who claimed to be from County Mayo while riding on a bar that rotated. It was awesome. The German guys finally managed to drag their friend out of there, and we made our way to the rides. After every big group decision and to show excitement the rest of the trip, we would do a double fist pump. So we double fist pumped our way to the kid-friendly side of Oktoberfest.
After watching Eric and Delaney go on a spinning ride (I would've vommed had I gone on it), we rode the bumper cars (instant headache) before walking to the Augustiner permanent beer hall outside the fest. Anne and Eric couldn't figure out how to make their bumper car move (by inserting the token into the car itself), so they sat in the corner while the rest of us drove around and into them. I'm sure they could've figured it out had we gone on the ride several steins earlier....
At Augustiner, the place El where raved about the apple strudel, we chowed down on potato salad and other German goodies while double fist pumping and watching Stu pick off the hops that decorated the light fixtures. We called it an early night and rested up for tomorrow's early morning lederhosen buying.
The next morning, I grabbed us breakfast at McDonald's on the walk back to the lederhosen store. I've gotta say, Germany's McDonald's breakfast menu BLOWS America's out of the water. They had a bread basket menu option with butter and various jams, and they had this sausage and cheese McMuffin (always think of Superbad when I think of McMuffins) with tomato and this creamy mustard sauce that I ordered. American McDonald's, take note! Everyone got to the store on time, and the guys all quickly found their lederhosen and shirts. El brought his from last year and bought shoes, socks and calf warmers to go with his ensemble. Rake had gotten in late the night before, and he found his lederhosen in five minutes flat. Dirndls are a lot harder to buy however, so it took some time for Anne, Emily and Delaney to find the perfect dirndl and blouse. Everyone found exactly what they were looking for though, although Delaney was pissed that she had only brought boots to Munich. People usually wear flats with those dresses, but who the hell cares when you're all acting sloppy in the tent?
Once again, we had a noon reservation at the Hofbrau Haus, but this year we managed to get a table on the main floor, right in the thick of the action. Our reservation was at an inner table on the side, so we had to climb over people just to get to our benches. For the rest of the fest, we just climbed over the barrier on the other side to go to the bathroom. Once again, the figure of St. Aloisius hung from the ceiling, and I told Annie that our table was to the left of the "hanging baby with the mustache". Because that's normal. As we were walking through the center of our fest to our table, some guy yelled, "Hey!" at me and then gave me the thumbs up. I'm sure he was giving me a thumbs up for my personality and intelligent way of debating educational policy, and not for how I looked in my dirndl. I gave him the thumbs-up back, to show that I too respected his intellect, and settled into our table.
Being on the inside, our table was a bit of a tight squeeze. There was a mutual understanding that we were going to sit butt-to-butt with strangers, and it didn't bother us. El had already picked up our beer and food tickets, so we ordered a round of steins the second we saw the waitress. Cheering "Prost!", our Oktoberfest adventure truly began. Soon after our round of beer came, the waitress brought out the platters of cheese, radishes and sausage that we had pre-ordered. Served on a slab of wood, everything was delicious, and I made sure to warm up my sausage before eating.
The group sitting next to us was older (40's and 50's), and once again El told them that Eric too spoke Heidi Klum. The guy next to Eric, Marcus, was a jolly fellow who kept manipulating Eric into saying German swear words. He told Eric that he was messing with him, so it's not like he was trying to be cruel. Just awesome.
Once again, the band played traditional German drinking songs, which, as we learned from Eric, is due to a law that regulates only German songs be played at a certain decibel level before 5:00pm, and steins went swinging through the air every time the band fired up "Ein Prosit!" People tried to chug their beers to the cheers of the crowd, but only a few were successful in downing the entire liter, including a girl whose extremely short dirndl made her the crowd favorite. Other p-words only managed to take down half their beer, and some only a fourth. You have to have some serious stones to take on a liter of beer in front of thousands of people. Or a serious liver.
Over the next few hours, more beers were had and half-chickens eaten. Eric took down 3 half chickens on his own, making up for lost time after being too hungover to eat much sausage and cheese. Rake disappeared for an hour, telling us that he was chatting with some girls while missing. He confessed the next day that he had joined the rest of the revelers and passed out on the hill behind the tent. Delaney started macking on the guy across from us, and we quietly went nuts over the fact that the blonde girl with him looked like the blonde cop from Reno 911! and his guy friend looked like Tin-Tin. I chatted with another member of his posse, who looked like a cuter Prince William with more hair. Celebrity sightings galore! We all chanted "BROUSE!" as one toast and chatted with the older group next to us, bursting out into song when one of the ladies told us her name was Barbara Anne. Marcus, Eric's new bestie, was interviewed by German tv, and we all desperately tried to get on camera by jumping behind Marcus and pretending to stand next to him like we've known him for years.
At 5:00 our reservation ended, and the people sitting there next were already standing by. I'm not gonna lie, the rest of the night was a shit-show that included:
-People ghosting and buying beer wizard hats and Lederhosen hats while bombed
-People peeing under picnic tables
-Nonsensical text messages
-Someone making out with a guy selling t-shirts (not any of the married folk!)
-Stu buying an umbrella with pink butterflies on it (Hey, the rain was coming down hard!)
-Random conversations in Spanish with a Romanian guy, French guy, and Spanish guy who all worked in Tenerife
-Random convos with German teachers
-Sitting in the pouring rain
-The handle coming off the door while Delaney was in the bathroom, locking her in. And then the handle slowly sliding out from under the door a few minutes later.
-People getting literally kicked out of the fest, and Rake getting man-handled.
-Eric getting peer pressured to do drugs by German people (He just said 'NO')
-And other tomfoolery that shall not be mentioned
The next day, El, Anne, Eric and I pushed through our hangovers to make the most of our last day in Munich. We had lunch in Marienplatz, where I had a pretzel soup and managed to choke down a beer. We also checked out the Bayern Munich team store, bought a sweater from the lederhosen shop, and purchased some goodies from the stein store that was closed on Wednesday. Walking through the crisp air was just what the doctor ordered, and we all felt more alive after a few hours of sunshine. El had left me, Anne and Eric to help Delaney find her lost purse back at the fest grounds, so met back up with them and Rake after running errands. El said the lost and found tent was MASSIVE with entire walls covered in purses, keys and other lost items. It's also a giant rip-off, as to re-claim your lost item costs you a fee. They had Delaney's jacket and wanted 15 euro for it. She didn't really care to get that back, but her purse wasn't in there at the time (when she went back the next day, it was there with all the contents minus cash). Delaney went back to Stu and Emily's hotel, and the rest of us decided to make the most of our last Oktoberfest day. Despite the hangovers, we were going to make that day COUNT.
We walked through the grounds for awhile and stopped to watch this slide ride that Anne and Eric had found our first night there. The slide itself isn't that exciting, but there's a conveyor belt that takes people to the top of the slide that is on a 45 degree angle and goes super fast. You can imagine all the people just losing control and biting it on the way up. They actually had workers helping people get to the top by holding their hands. There was a huge crowd watching people attempt the conveyor belt, and everyone would erupt when someone just lost it. The drunk people were always the most amusing, and Elliot called the most epic fall before it even happened, "The guy in the wizard hat's going to eat it". And eat it he did. In a SPECTACULAR fashion. We watched the ride for a solid 30 minutes before wandering over to the beer hall across from it.
Rake asked the guy at the door if there was seating for five, and despite the door guy turning everyone else away, he actually let us come in. This beer hall was LEGIT, with only Germans inside, wooden fixtures and lights with antlers hanging from them. There was a guy playing keyboard who looked like the German guy in Super Troopers (but with long hair, and who was also the ref in Beerfest) playing German drinking songs with him and a woman singing. We got seated at a table with two Americans who didn't say a word, a kid who looked like he was 12, a girl drinking a wine spritzer who resembled Rebel Wilson, and a guy who looked like the lead singer of Train. It was a rag tag bunch of folks, and boring compared to the other tables who were standing on their chairs singing and dancing.
I had another bowl of soup (this was like my third bowl this trip), and we all ordered beers and Diet Cokes (yep, I couldn't do beer at that point) while we watched girls lifting up their dirndl skirts to show off their underwear while singing drinking songs, couples dancing on the floor, and the entire beer hall do the motions to this song about lassos, cowboys and Indians. Two girls stood behind our waitress while she was taking our order and lifted up their skirts and pretended to flash her while she wasn't looking. The girl lost her sunglasses at one point, and Rake was able to con a kiss for helping her look. While Hofbrau Haus was an epic experience, this was an authentic one.
After the boring Americans left, the random Germans started talking to Anne and Eric and were a lot more lively than expected. They were absolutely flabbergasted that the drinking age in America is 21. "Even for beer???" they asked, totally bewildered. Yep, America can be rough stuff. Don't even get me started on different culture's approaches to alcohol. I will jump up on a major soapbox, I tell you!
We eventually got shuffled out with the rest of the crowd at 6:00 pm, so we watched the Slide of Death some more before attempting to enter our favorite place, the Carousel bar. It was wayyyy too crowded at this point (it was Friday night, after all), so we want back to the Augustiner Beer Hall for another round. I had another helping of potato salad (By this point, I'm surprised I didn't turn into a potato), and we all laughed over our last beer together in Munich. The convo was mildly spoiled by the drunk, crying girl at the end of our table who later dined and ditched, but it wasn't enough to put the skitters in our Alan Whickers, plonker.
The next morning, we caught the bus back to the airport and flew back to Espana, our livers and dignity mostly intact. We may not have felt our best, but at least we didn't leave Doug on the roof.....
Any fans of Beerfest will know that no, my blog hasn't taken a perverse turn, and that the blog title is in reference to the wisdom of Great Gam-Gam. Anytime October rolls around, Beerfest quotes fly through the Brouse household like swear words in Ireland. Some people view Oktoberfest as a "once in a lifetime experience" (kinda like how we did with Tomatina), not willing to deal with the debauchery more than once. The Brouses are not those people. Not only is Munich an awesome city; the experience of Oktoberfest is just too much fun to NOT repeat. And Oktoberfest with my bestie from Chicago and her husband? It's on like Donkey Kong.
Our flight schedule this year wasn't the greatest, but it was infinitely better than last year's shenanigans of flying overnight via London to Munich Memmigen and then taking an hour and a half shuttle to Munich city center. Since our flight was at 6:30am on Wednesday morning, we drove down to Malaga on Tuesday night and got a room at the Holiday Inn Express by the airport. Actually finding the hotel was a bit of a fiasco in itself, as it didn't register on our GPS or on Elliot's updated iPhone with iMaps. We drove past the same Toys 'R Us half a dozen times, and I was about to go on a murderous rampage starting with Geoffrey the Giraffe when we finally found the green Holiday Inn sign. We had a quick bite to eat before settling down for basically a nap before our flight.
We had a stop in Madrid, but our flight from Malaga got in early, so we had a little bit of time to kill before our next flight to Munich. El was able to snooze on the first flight, and I was able to catch a few zzzz's before landing in Munich International Airport. Our flight arrived at 11:15am, and Annie Mitch and Eric's flight from Dublin arrived 30 minutes prior. When we collected our luggage (basically huge, empty suitcases to fill with steins), we walked through the doors and Annie was holding a sign that said "BROUSE" and was decorated with drawings of beer mugs.
Anne and I have been friends since freshman year of high school, when we were 14 and obviously knew it all. She and I played softball together our first three years and became great friends. We really got close the summer after graduation, when Anne, me, Ashley, Kristin and Krystal spent every day together. We all became best friends that summer and have been best friends ever since. We've been through a lot together, have countless memories, and always pick up where left off when we're reunited. The funny thing is that everyone is so unique and different from each other; it really makes for a motley crew of best friends. But somehow it works, and I love those 4 girls like family.
When Annie Mitch (I use Anne, Annie and Annie Mitch interchangeably) and I are together, we laugh nonstop. Our personalities are super similar, so we share the same values and perception of the world. The fact that she had a sign with beer mugs on it should probably prove how well she knows me. We laughed and gave each other a huge hug and hitched a bus to Munich's train station. She also brought me bags of Pizzeria Pretzel Combos, my most favoritest snack that I can't find in Spain. Um yeah, I opened a bag immediately
The train station (basically the city center close to our hotel) was about a 20 minute ride by bus, and the driver graciously drove past Delaney's (Emily's friend who was with them) and the Dean's hotels so they could see where they needed to walk next. We all went to our respective hotels and agreed to clean up and meet up in Marienplatz to buy steins and lederhosen.
We were able to book the Best Western Cristal on Schwalenstrasse (spelling is a guess), just a stone's throw away from Oktoberfest. It was about 2 blocks closer to the fest than last year's Hotel Prasident, and we had to book in January to get a room. All hotels in that area are CRAZY expensive that time of year, but we had decided to pay a little bit more for the convenience of being stumbling distance from Das Boot. The hotel was nice though and surprisingly had A/C, which came in handy for the unseasonably warm German weather we had (not complaining).
Around 2, we all met up in front of the glockenspiel of Marienplatz and grabbed a table inside the same restaurant we had dinner at last year (with the Blue Mooners). We naturally ordered up a round of beer. Unfortunately (fortunately?), they were only serving beers in the liter stein glasses, so we all were a little bit saucy after just one heavy, German beer. We gorged ourselves on conversation, laughs, potato salad and that sweet, golden nectar before walking to the stein store. It turns out that Wednesday was a bank holiday, and ALL shops were closed. We noted the hours of the stein store, made a mental note to go back on Friday, and searched for the store where we had purchased our lederhosen and dirndl. Considering we had just stumbled upon it last year, it was a miracle that we found this place again. It too was closed, but it would be open at 10am the next morning. We all agreed to go before our tent reservation at noon so we could all look the part in the Hofbrau Haus.
Down but not defeated, and after taking a group Gangnam style picture in Marienplatz, we decided to check out the reason for our visit: to find Barry Badrinath. Or get sour on some krauts, either one.
You could hear the fest from far away, and Elliot somehow remembered how to get there from our hotel (E= MC Hammered?). The weather was beautiful, everyone was in the spirit (or drinking spirits), and the sounds of the carnival rides and beer halls rang through the air. For those of you who didn't read last year's Toni Kukoc-filled adventure, you already know that you can't be served beer unless you are sitting at a table in a beer tent or beer garden. The only "public" bar is this outdoor one right by the fest's entrance, and it rotates beer sponsors every year. Hoping to cash in the tokens he had from last year's Paulaner adventure, El was disappointed that this year's beer was Hacker and his money was no good there. We first found a spot right by the bathrooms, where Eric and Anne made best friends with an older German guy and Prost'ed with him a few minutes. Then the realization that we were standing by a bathroom sunk in (or STUNK IN! RIM SHOT!), and we quickly grabbed the standing table a group of people had just left. We ended up staying and drinking there until the sun started going down, making conversations with the random German people around us. Emily struck up a conversation with a young German guy whose friends kept trying to leave (we must've said goodbye to them no fewer than 3 times); Elliot made Eric talk to a German guy and his 7 year old daughter who just waltzed right up to our table (for some reason, even though Elliot speaks more German than Eric, El got it in his head that Eric was fluent and would tell random German people there Eric spoke Deutsche), and Anne and I sang the Wild Rover with some curly-haired guy who claimed to be from County Mayo while riding on a bar that rotated. It was awesome. The German guys finally managed to drag their friend out of there, and we made our way to the rides. After every big group decision and to show excitement the rest of the trip, we would do a double fist pump. So we double fist pumped our way to the kid-friendly side of Oktoberfest.
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| Besties |
At Augustiner, the place El where raved about the apple strudel, we chowed down on potato salad and other German goodies while double fist pumping and watching Stu pick off the hops that decorated the light fixtures. We called it an early night and rested up for tomorrow's early morning lederhosen buying.
The next morning, I grabbed us breakfast at McDonald's on the walk back to the lederhosen store. I've gotta say, Germany's McDonald's breakfast menu BLOWS America's out of the water. They had a bread basket menu option with butter and various jams, and they had this sausage and cheese McMuffin (always think of Superbad when I think of McMuffins) with tomato and this creamy mustard sauce that I ordered. American McDonald's, take note! Everyone got to the store on time, and the guys all quickly found their lederhosen and shirts. El brought his from last year and bought shoes, socks and calf warmers to go with his ensemble. Rake had gotten in late the night before, and he found his lederhosen in five minutes flat. Dirndls are a lot harder to buy however, so it took some time for Anne, Emily and Delaney to find the perfect dirndl and blouse. Everyone found exactly what they were looking for though, although Delaney was pissed that she had only brought boots to Munich. People usually wear flats with those dresses, but who the hell cares when you're all acting sloppy in the tent?
Once again, we had a noon reservation at the Hofbrau Haus, but this year we managed to get a table on the main floor, right in the thick of the action. Our reservation was at an inner table on the side, so we had to climb over people just to get to our benches. For the rest of the fest, we just climbed over the barrier on the other side to go to the bathroom. Once again, the figure of St. Aloisius hung from the ceiling, and I told Annie that our table was to the left of the "hanging baby with the mustache". Because that's normal. As we were walking through the center of our fest to our table, some guy yelled, "Hey!" at me and then gave me the thumbs up. I'm sure he was giving me a thumbs up for my personality and intelligent way of debating educational policy, and not for how I looked in my dirndl. I gave him the thumbs-up back, to show that I too respected his intellect, and settled into our table.
 |
| Definitely the intellect |
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| Good thing there was no ram's piss.... |
Once again, the band played traditional German drinking songs, which, as we learned from Eric, is due to a law that regulates only German songs be played at a certain decibel level before 5:00pm, and steins went swinging through the air every time the band fired up "Ein Prosit!" People tried to chug their beers to the cheers of the crowd, but only a few were successful in downing the entire liter, including a girl whose extremely short dirndl made her the crowd favorite. Other p-words only managed to take down half their beer, and some only a fourth. You have to have some serious stones to take on a liter of beer in front of thousands of people. Or a serious liver.
Over the next few hours, more beers were had and half-chickens eaten. Eric took down 3 half chickens on his own, making up for lost time after being too hungover to eat much sausage and cheese. Rake disappeared for an hour, telling us that he was chatting with some girls while missing. He confessed the next day that he had joined the rest of the revelers and passed out on the hill behind the tent. Delaney started macking on the guy across from us, and we quietly went nuts over the fact that the blonde girl with him looked like the blonde cop from Reno 911! and his guy friend looked like Tin-Tin. I chatted with another member of his posse, who looked like a cuter Prince William with more hair. Celebrity sightings galore! We all chanted "BROUSE!" as one toast and chatted with the older group next to us, bursting out into song when one of the ladies told us her name was Barbara Anne. Marcus, Eric's new bestie, was interviewed by German tv, and we all desperately tried to get on camera by jumping behind Marcus and pretending to stand next to him like we've known him for years.
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| Prost! |
-People ghosting and buying beer wizard hats and Lederhosen hats while bombed
-People peeing under picnic tables
-Nonsensical text messages
-Someone making out with a guy selling t-shirts (not any of the married folk!)
-Stu buying an umbrella with pink butterflies on it (Hey, the rain was coming down hard!)
-Random conversations in Spanish with a Romanian guy, French guy, and Spanish guy who all worked in Tenerife
-Random convos with German teachers
-Sitting in the pouring rain
-The handle coming off the door while Delaney was in the bathroom, locking her in. And then the handle slowly sliding out from under the door a few minutes later.
-People getting literally kicked out of the fest, and Rake getting man-handled.
-Eric getting peer pressured to do drugs by German people (He just said 'NO')
-And other tomfoolery that shall not be mentioned
The next day, El, Anne, Eric and I pushed through our hangovers to make the most of our last day in Munich. We had lunch in Marienplatz, where I had a pretzel soup and managed to choke down a beer. We also checked out the Bayern Munich team store, bought a sweater from the lederhosen shop, and purchased some goodies from the stein store that was closed on Wednesday. Walking through the crisp air was just what the doctor ordered, and we all felt more alive after a few hours of sunshine. El had left me, Anne and Eric to help Delaney find her lost purse back at the fest grounds, so met back up with them and Rake after running errands. El said the lost and found tent was MASSIVE with entire walls covered in purses, keys and other lost items. It's also a giant rip-off, as to re-claim your lost item costs you a fee. They had Delaney's jacket and wanted 15 euro for it. She didn't really care to get that back, but her purse wasn't in there at the time (when she went back the next day, it was there with all the contents minus cash). Delaney went back to Stu and Emily's hotel, and the rest of us decided to make the most of our last Oktoberfest day. Despite the hangovers, we were going to make that day COUNT.
We walked through the grounds for awhile and stopped to watch this slide ride that Anne and Eric had found our first night there. The slide itself isn't that exciting, but there's a conveyor belt that takes people to the top of the slide that is on a 45 degree angle and goes super fast. You can imagine all the people just losing control and biting it on the way up. They actually had workers helping people get to the top by holding their hands. There was a huge crowd watching people attempt the conveyor belt, and everyone would erupt when someone just lost it. The drunk people were always the most amusing, and Elliot called the most epic fall before it even happened, "The guy in the wizard hat's going to eat it". And eat it he did. In a SPECTACULAR fashion. We watched the ride for a solid 30 minutes before wandering over to the beer hall across from it.
Rake asked the guy at the door if there was seating for five, and despite the door guy turning everyone else away, he actually let us come in. This beer hall was LEGIT, with only Germans inside, wooden fixtures and lights with antlers hanging from them. There was a guy playing keyboard who looked like the German guy in Super Troopers (but with long hair, and who was also the ref in Beerfest) playing German drinking songs with him and a woman singing. We got seated at a table with two Americans who didn't say a word, a kid who looked like he was 12, a girl drinking a wine spritzer who resembled Rebel Wilson, and a guy who looked like the lead singer of Train. It was a rag tag bunch of folks, and boring compared to the other tables who were standing on their chairs singing and dancing.
I had another bowl of soup (this was like my third bowl this trip), and we all ordered beers and Diet Cokes (yep, I couldn't do beer at that point) while we watched girls lifting up their dirndl skirts to show off their underwear while singing drinking songs, couples dancing on the floor, and the entire beer hall do the motions to this song about lassos, cowboys and Indians. Two girls stood behind our waitress while she was taking our order and lifted up their skirts and pretended to flash her while she wasn't looking. The girl lost her sunglasses at one point, and Rake was able to con a kiss for helping her look. While Hofbrau Haus was an epic experience, this was an authentic one.
After the boring Americans left, the random Germans started talking to Anne and Eric and were a lot more lively than expected. They were absolutely flabbergasted that the drinking age in America is 21. "Even for beer???" they asked, totally bewildered. Yep, America can be rough stuff. Don't even get me started on different culture's approaches to alcohol. I will jump up on a major soapbox, I tell you!
We eventually got shuffled out with the rest of the crowd at 6:00 pm, so we watched the Slide of Death some more before attempting to enter our favorite place, the Carousel bar. It was wayyyy too crowded at this point (it was Friday night, after all), so we want back to the Augustiner Beer Hall for another round. I had another helping of potato salad (By this point, I'm surprised I didn't turn into a potato), and we all laughed over our last beer together in Munich. The convo was mildly spoiled by the drunk, crying girl at the end of our table who later dined and ditched, but it wasn't enough to put the skitters in our Alan Whickers, plonker.
The next morning, we caught the bus back to the airport and flew back to Espana, our livers and dignity mostly intact. We may not have felt our best, but at least we didn't leave Doug on the roof.....
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