Oktoberfest 2007

On Monday 1st October I left Travemuende after a month there and started travelling towards my next gig back in the Austrian Alps. Conveniently, it was a Monday which is my day off and I had to travel through Munich, so of course I had the night free to check out Oktoberfest! I checked into my hotel (which I had to book months in advance) at about 4pm and headed straight to the Wies'n where it is held.

Basically Oktoberfest is a lot of beer and a lot of Germans (or, more specifically Bavarians) dressed in traditional costumes and drinking said beer. Of course, there are lots of tourists too especially Australians, Americans and English. All of the major Munich breweries have a tent (some have 2!) and they serve the beer in 1L glasses... To get a seat inside the tents, you generally have to reserve a place, but there was room in the beer gardens and it was much easier to find somewhere to sit since I was on my own. The beer makes everyone pretty friendly, so it wasn't long before I had made a whole lot of new friends.

The first thing I was amazed by (and this was even in the train station well before I arrived at Oktoberfest) was the number of men and women actually wearing traditional outfits. Apparently most German men own Lederhosen and bring them out on special occasions like this! At first, this made me laugh a lot, because they really do look pretty funny, but after a while in the beer tents (and a few beers) it seemed perfectly logical to wear knee high socks and leather trousers with braces over a coloured check shirt and a colourful handkerchief tied around your neck. I opted for a tacky tourist t-shirt instead.

Secondly, the tents themselves are amazing. They are on such a huge scale and are packed full of people enjoying their beer and traditional food (lots of pig, of course). Here are some photos of the outside of some of the tents (take special note of the lederhosen in the last pic!)

The lion on the Lowenbrau tent even moved and roared!

The insides of the tents were just as incredible. These are the Paulaner tent, the Hofbrauhaus tent and the other Paulaner tent (again note the number of traditional costumes, especially in the first photo!):

Some sadistic fool decided it was a good idea to have carnival rides at Oktoberfest. I didn't go on any of them, but just watching them was enough to make you feel quite ill after all that beer!

Needless to say, I sampled the beers in a few of the tents. The initial plan was to take a photo of me with each of the beers, but that got a little hazy after the 4th or 5th...

(Paulaner)


(Lowenbrau)


(the other Paulaner tent)

(the Fischer something tent with some of my new friends wearing lederhosen! haha)

It was a really fun night, but let's just say that travelling to Laengenfeld on the train the next day wasn't quite as fun.

It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience to be able to be in Munich for Oktoberfest and I am certainly glad I did it. I am amazed by the tourists that go for a week and are in the tents every night... hard core!

I have now sworn off drinking for a couple of weeks just to let my liver recover.