3 weeks of spending way too much money to have even more fun. I went to Oktoberfest with about twenty international friends in late September, and went numerous times to the Stuttgart Canstatter Volksfest, which was conveniently only a 20 minute trip on the S-Bahn. We drank, we danced, and we sang German songs completely wrong. My friend from Turkey kept singing the traditional song “Ein prosit…” as “I’m frozen!...”
Our Oktoberfest trip was the most fun I have had in a long time. My father had promised me years ago when I told him I wanted to study abroad in Germany that he would meet me for Oktoberfest. So he flew out for the weekend to join my friends and me for the biggest drinking festival in the world. We started our day at 2:30am. We reluctantly dragged ourselves out of bed and got ready as the party at Sansibar (a bar downstairs in my building) was still raging. Then we all met up and went to the bus stop to catch the night bus into the city since the trains don’t run at 3am. It was quite funny to arrive in the city center to start our day and see all the drunks climbing onto the bus to end theirs. After I got off, I shrugged my shoulders to pull my purse back up and managed to pull a muscle in my neck. I hope you have never experienced it, but it is pretty decapitating. Since it was somewhere around 4am and there definitely wasn’t an Apotheke around to buy pain killers, I decided I might as well start my day off right, and I bought a little bottle of Jack Daniels to help ease my pain.
We arrived via train in München around 7:30am, gathered our group together after stops for food and umbrellas, and walked to Oktoberfest. I cannot believe how many drunken Germans there were! On the train, boys in lederhosen were walking past us with already-half-empty cases of beer. While waiting outside the tent, everywhere you looked someone had a beer in their hands. It was awesome, despite the fact that it was pouring and the crowd got pushier by the minute. This one German was pushing right through all of my friends and I wasn’t going to let him get any farther. It didn’t take long before he realized that he was not going to get back to his friends. So he gave up trying and started chatting with my dad and me. About three sentences into our conversation, I realized how drunk this guy was. He said he had been driving for four hours and drinking the whole way, natürlich. I don’t even remember what he was talking about, but I just remember that he kept saying “normally”. “That is normally in Germany”. He never used it once correctly, but he probably said it about nine times in the half hour we were stuck standing next to him.
My dad and Adam the 'Normally' dude
Finally, 9 o’clock! The gates to heaven opened. We were packed like sardines fighting to get through the door. Fortunately, we were able to get two tables. Unfortunately, they weren’t next to each other, and no one would switch tables. Humph, Germans. Oh well, we made the best of the situation; it gave us an excuse to drunkenly wander the tent.
From what I remember, that was an incredible day. I stole Leigh’s hat back from a man who stole it from him. Rob, our friend from England, apparently got in a fight. My dad danced on the tables with a bunch of random girls in dirndls. I got lost in the crowd on the way home. Thank you Kate for finding me!
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