Oktoberfest

This past weekend I met up with friends living in Munchen to experience Oktoberfest.  Franz's host parents were very gracious and allowed 4 of us to sleep on their floor for the weekend.  

It was a long train ride and I arrived very hungry. Once we are all together we went to Franz's village and tried the local cuisine (and beer):

 This pork dish was awesome. I especially liked the Potato-dumpling-ball that came with it.  Apparently this is a very Bayerisch and Austrian dish.

After we ate we hung out with Franz's host dad and Opa.  We sat around talking, eating prezels, and drinking Weissbier for a few hours.  It was difficult speaking and listening to German for so long, but we talked about a lot of interesting things.  The family has hosted 8 Americans, and had plenty of stories to tell and things to tell us.  While we were sitting around, they received a phone call from their Aunt (80 years old) who lives in Albuquerque- of all places. We ended up talking on the phone and she was very sweet.

On Saturday morning we woke up around 6:30 in order to get in line for a tent at the fest.  It was very surreal and hilarious walking around at dawn, with thousands of people dressed up in absurd Oktoberfest outfits, through essentially a carnival fairgrounds:

After a lot of confusion about what is an enterance and what is not, we ended up at the Himmel Der Bayern (Sky of Bayern).  It was pretty terrible and cold waiting in line. And, when I say line, I mean a massive hoard of sober, confused tourists.

One of the storerooms:

Once they started letting people in, it was pure chaos.  Look at all of these people behind us hoping to get in:

Now imagine that all of them reeeealllly didn't want to have waited 1.5 hrs in the early-morning cold in vain.  Then visualize all of them pushing the crowd forward until it broke on the tent's small door the same way raiding knights crash upon the castle-gate in the movies.  I am surprised no one got seriously injured as we were propelled forward and into the tent.

A couple friend ran upstairs and we ended up getting an awesome table.  We sat around and drank 1 liter steins and ordered half-chickens with some coupons a friend had found.  The energy inside the tent was impressively rowdy- every ten minutes someone would stand on a table and start chugging, which would make the whole place erupt in cheering and clapping.  If the person was succesful, they were famous for the two minutes between finishing and getting thrown out by security. If they didn't finish their drink, everyone boo-ed and through food at them.  The whole experience was medieval, just look at this chicken we had:

What we didn't realize during our time running to the table, was that the table  was reserved beginning at 12:30pm.  Accordingly, at 12:29 pm precisely, in the middle of our merry-making, the bouncers came and kicked us out to the streets.  After much wandering we ended up at the outdoor seating of another tent.  It was this cold:

And then an hour later it was this cold:

We rallied for a selfie and then headed home.

The next morning I took the train back to Saarbruecken.  Here are some typical views from the train- farm land and solar panel installations: