Sophia: “This is great. I can be as loud as I want, and no one cares!” And that pretty much sums up the Oktoberfest experience.
One of the great things about being in Europe is, obviously, being relatively close to so many places. To a certain degree, you can just fill a backpack and go on the road to a well-known destination/event – such as Oktoberfest. And this is exactly what we did.
The story begins with us hanging out with a few of our friends earlier in the week, and one of them mentioning that their cousin lives in Munich. We all joked about how great it would be to go there and have a place to stay, etc., and then we all went home that night and forgot about it. Well, the next day, we get an e-mail with a rental car confirmation; split five ways, how could you say no? I mean, literally you could say no, but I’m speaking more figuratively…anyway, the point is, we ended up getting ahold of another friend who’s from Germany, who was also going and staying with one of his old college friends, and as a result, we had the perfect excuse for a last-minute getaway.
Now, before we start talking about how great everything worked out, let me just throw in that there were three of us squished into the back seat of a small Peugeot, on what was supposedly a six-hour trip but in reality was an eleven-hour drive each way. Not the most comfortable of conditions.
Back to the story…so once in Munich, we decide we’re going to get up early on Saturday so that we can get into a tent. We wake up at 6:30am – and anyone who knows me knows I don’t joke about getting up early –and head to the festival. When we get there around 8:00, there are masses of people standing outside each of the tents waiting to get in (doors open at 9:00). Unbeknownst to most of you, Sophia has a surprisingly developed skill of getting to the front of large crowds, something I’ve never perfected; so on her lead, we got pretty near to the entrance. Looking back, this probably was a bad idea, because there were a couple moments 
when the crowd was so restless that I thought someone was going to get crushed (apparently, a couple people fainted due to anxiety attacks and not being able to breathe; it was pretty crazy. And by crazy, I mean “totally sweet”). Anyway, when we were about 200 people deep, they stopped letting anyone else into the tent, which actually was okay because the whole being-in-a-massive-seething-crowd thing had completely lost any semblance of an attraction. On a stroke of quick thinking, though, one of our friends (who we had lost in the crowd) had the foresight to grab a bench right near where we were standing outside the tent. Considering it was a beautiful day, and they were serving both food and drinks outside, it turned out to be just as good, if not better, than the tent would have been.
The fun part about Oktoberfest is that it’s so easy to meet random people from all over the world. While we were at the bench, we were joined by a handful of other demographics; there were the 17 year-old Germans, who when combined with us were easily the loudest table of the festival (they taught us German cheers); some early-twenties Brits, who were also a lot of fun; some Italians, who were completely sketchy; and then some more Germans who were dressed in Lederhosen. Lederhosen rules.
A little note about Oktoberfest; there are a few things going 
on there. First, you have the tents, which are where the serious party happens. Even the tents are segmented, though, between the open parts, where the drinking occurs, and the reserved parts, where families / groups of people / etc. hang out. It all mixes nicely, of course, but the middle of the tents tend to be filled with people standing on the tables singing and cheering to the oom-pah bands, while the outer rings are people sitting around just chilling out and talking. Good stuff. At the same time, outside the tents is completely different. Hundreds of thousands of people – literally hundreds of thousands – are just walking around. Most of them are there to do just that – walk around and look at stuff; then there are also a bunch of carnival-style rides, and surprisingly a lot of families and little children. Lastly, there are a handful of extremely drunk people sitting wherever they’re able to find a space; they tend to have no idea what country they’re in, and don’t realize that people stand next to them making faces while taking pictures.
On Sunday, one of the people we were staying with 
had been smart enough to reserve spaces in the Hofbrauhausen tent (eight months in advance), so we were finally able to get in. The tents, as mentioned above, are a lot of fun, and have a lot of energy; a wave of cheers will break out every five minutes or so and you can’t resist joining in and yelling “Prost” while clinking beer glasses with everyone around you, including the strangers. Each tent (and there are twelve main ones) has its own personality, although all of them are huge and surprisingly ornate considering they have to be broken down and put back together every year. After hanging out for a couple hours in our original tent, we did a “tent crawl” and checked out some of the others - fun stuff.
All in all, Oktoberfest definitely lived up to the 
hype. If you’re interested in going, I’m pretty sure we’ll be back next year, with tent reservations, hotel accommodations and Lederhosen in hand. It’s hard to compare it to anything I’ve seen before, because it really is a unique event; everyone is just so happy and friendly! But I guess that’s the magic of German beer. Also, what we saw of Munich was fantastic – can’t wait to go back there and explore it a bit more, as the public transportation was great and it has a lot of elements of old-school Bavaria.
No more trips for the next few weeks…but still more entries to come!
Oktoberfest 2007!
