Munich - Oktoberfest

9/30/07 – 10/1/07



Cheers! Gotta have a couple of beers before an 8 hour flight. :) Once we got to Munich, we got a taxi to the hotel and found that although the hotel room was small, it was very nice. We are also located right on the west edge of the city, which is walking distance to both sites in the city and Oktoberfest.

After unpacking and showering, we walked around and found a little “fast food” restaurant, with AWESOME food, but we have no idea what kind of food it was (German? Indian? Not sure). We came back to the hotel, watched Princess Bride on my computer, and fell asleep around 9PM local time (we are so old!), with the goal of getting a good night sleep and getting up early to go to Oktoberfest. We had bought voltage converters and plug adapters, so my noise machine and computer were able to be plugged in.

In the middle of the night I woke up to find that the noise machine had overheated the converter and shorted out all our fuses in our room! It smelled awesome! :) Plus, the rooms here don’t have air conditioning, so our window was open and we are facing a busy street, so it was really noisy. I wasn’t tired anymore, and thankfully Paul woke up too and he wasn’t tired either. We checked the time and it was 1AM, so we decided to go out for pizza. The guy at the main desk flipped the breaker for us, so now our lights work again :)

There are so many pizzerias around here, it’s awesome! And it’s the good real Italian pizza, not the crap we have back home. I think it’s harder to find real German food than Italian food. Anyway, we found this awesome Italian bistro and had some pizza and wine and now we are back at the hotel room deciding when we will be able to sleep. This is the weirdest jet lag I’ve ever had.


10/2/07


We got to Octoberfest pretty early. On the way to the HofBrau tent, we saw a merry-go-round bar. Weird.





I think it was around 11AM that we got to the tent, and the place was pretty empty. We couldn’t believe how big it was!










It definitely wasn’t what you would think of when you hear the word “tent”. We stood at a table (since the sit-down benches are reserved) and ordered 2 steins of beer.







It was really good beer. We tried to drink slowly, but we started feeling tipsy pretty fast. I guess their beer is a lot stronger than American beer, or at least that’s what we are telling ourselves.


Around 1PM a group of guys from Holland joined us at the table and the oopah (sp?) band started.





We started talking to the guys and had a great time. They were really nice and fun. We ate huge pretzels and rotisserie chicken, which was SOOOO good!





People were dancing on the tables and the band kept playing some song that basically says “Cheers, let’s drink!” Just another excuse to drink more. At one point, 2 of our Dutch friends went up on stage to sing because they knew the band from when they played in their home town in Holland!







And, of course, there were some people getting completely sloppy and got tossed out by the police. I think I actually saw some guy trying to resist arrest. Not smart.

There were a lot of people dressed in the traditional German outfits, with leiderhosen (or however you spell it), but there were 2 guys also in dresses with spray-painted pink hair (we think they lost a bet). A lot of people had hats on too, all different kinds of hats, not really sure why. Two of our Dutch friends had some kind of traditional Austrian outfits on just to be funny.

It started getting really crowded around 3PM (I think :)) and another group joined our table. There was a girl in the group that grew up in Munich, but spent 2 years in San Francisco a couple of years ago. She loved it and wants to go back to it or to any American city (NY, LA, any big city). She was really cool.

After another hour or so, it was getting really hot and I was exhausted, so Paul walked me back to the hotel (but not after getting some white sausage with mustard and sauerkraut – YUM!). We felt like such wusses. Our Dutch friends had been telling us how the Italians can’t drink, how they fall down drunk after 4 beers, and Paul and I only had 5 beers altogether (I had 2 and he had 3), so now we are afraid that they are laughing at us! Oh well.

We got back to the hotel and passed out until 9PM. Then we got up and went to eat pizza again (shocker) at a different pizzeria and it was just as good as the first place! I wish we could find such good pizza in the US! So now, it is noon on Wednesday and we are still lying in bed. I think the beer here is laced with drugs because we can’t seem to snap out of it. Hopefully we will get to do some site-seeing today, but I’m not sure.

Tomorrow we’ll do Oktoberfest again. Hopefully we’ll see our Dutch friends again and hold up for longer! By the way, Paul loves this country. You can smoke anywhere. However, apparently in Europe, real men don't smoke menthols. I guess Paul is going to have to defend his manhood since he smokes Newports ;) Ha ha, just kidding.



10/3/07

Okay, it’s 5:30PM and we just got back from doing a little site-seeing. Our hotel room was too hot to stay in all day and we wanted to get out anyway. The weather here has been so gorgeous. Blue skies and warm weather – a little too warm for not having air conditioning, but so much better than rainy and cold.

We got to see a lot of the sites in the guide book I got. I don’t think we’ll really go into any museums – we just aren’t museum people – but we definitely want to go see the Residenz (which is like a palace or something), which we are planning for Friday.

This is a picture of Michaelskirche, a really old Renassaince church that had to be repaired after it collapsed.






This is the Glockenspiel. It's really amazing, but it looks like they are doing renovations. We are going to go again tomorrow at 11AM when the plays and the life-size carved figures come out. Hopefully it will play even though there might be renovations going on.








Also, here's a statue in front of the church. I can't remember who it's supposed to represent, but it's a cool statue.




This is Peterskirche, the oldest Parish church in Munich. Lots of beautiful churches and buildings here, but also a lot of modern buildings. It's an interesting mix that makes it fun to walk through.





In the guide book I have, I found a restaurant called Augustiner Gaststatten, which is in the oldest still-standing brewery, but it doesn't actually brew beer anymore.





The reason I was interested in it is because it serves traditional Bavarian food, which I really wanted to try! And I'm so glad we did because it was awesome!! We even took pictures of our meals :) I had something with noodles (I think they were like Gnocci), mushrooms, ravioli, and sausage. Paul had some kind of pork with a dumpling and cabbage. YUM!






While we were eating, a small 3-person band was playing some nice music, but they were dressed up like traditional English men. Very strange.




Then we got Gelato on the way back to the hotel. The food and the little bit of site-seeing made my day! So now we are back in the hotel room resting some more. Maybe we'll go out a little later, but not late. We want to get up early to see some sites before returning to Oktoberfest to do more damage to our bodies :)