Written by Spring Fornell, a StoryStudio student who recently attended our In-Town Retreat.

Oktoberfest
Travel opens you.  It pushes you to experience life beyond your comfort level and expands your boundaries of understanding.  My husband and I took a year to see all that we could, only to find we have not seen enough. 

“Come on honey let’s go.  It’s Monday night it won’t be that crowded.” Yeah right, seven million people are showing up over a three-week period.  I don’t think Monday night will be less crowded.  We had just spent a long nine hours on a train through the Bavarian Alps.  I was not in the mood to check out the party scene at Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany.  Although my feet were dragging and I really just wanted dinner, I made the effort to interpret the subway map and get us there. 

The funny thing about parties, is that at a really good one it is impossible not to have a great time.  This is the quintessential harvest party. Why do they call it Oktoberfest when two of the three weeks are in September? Oktoberfest means the “festival of the harvest” in Bavarian. Besides, the weather is better in September.

There are several Oktoberfest celebrations throughout the world.  Munich’s is the original, the largest, and the best. Oktoberfest is the three-week long celebration in honor of King Ludwig’s marriage in 1810. The first wedding party lasted three days and they have been celebrating every year ever since in the same exact spot.  This is the way Thanksgiving should be done.

The place is reminiscent of a very large fair ground and carnival.  There are carnival rides, roasted nuts, and rigged games with stuffed animal prizes.  Intermixed in all this, are, what they call, beer tents.  If you can call a wooden structure that holds 100,000 people a tent.  There is a live band in all of them and lots of beer. The beer is sold by the liter and pretzels by the meter. The beer is actually really good and I don’t like beer.  The beer for Oktoberfest is only made during Oktoberfest.  It is the same color as Budweiser, but tastes nothing like it.  The “sweet beer” is smooth, rich, has no after taste and doesn’t leave you with regrets in the morning.

One bite into my first real bratwurst and I was never going to leave.  It had the perfect casing that popped with the juices escaping down your chin.  The firm meat, hot and falling apart, is as tender as it is supposed to be.  Not the mealy ground to a paste, packed in plastic of the boiled microwave ones found in U.S. fill-up stations.  I am sure the brat came in a bun but the meat was so good I can’t remember the bread.  As soon as I finished it I looked for another but decided to try the beer instead.

For all the people, it was easy to get around. We found a table in a beer garden and asked to sit.  The youngsters immediately started talking and asking questions.  I finally just said, “I don’t understand you.” This was not a problem, they started the whole conversation over in English. The locals were more than happy to fill us in on all the local customs and protocol for Oktoberfest.  The basic rule: have a good time, singing is required, and dancing on tables is allowed.  Don’t worry if you can’t carry a tune or keep the beat, neither can your new best friend next to you and no one is paying attention anyway.  It turns out that one of them was celebrating her 16th birthday and the other two would be 16 next month.  She had been celebrating her birthday at Oktoberfest since she was two years old.  They ordered beer for us and Keith lit their cigarettes.  When it was explained to them that in the U.S. he would be put in jail for this, they simply ask ‘Why.” Being nice is just something that is done.  It is not a jail worthy offense.  It was almost ten pm so they ordered one more round (a liter each) before heading home.  After all, they had school the next day. 

Also at our table, was the self-proclaimed Irish drinking team.  I have been shamed by the drinking prowess of many an Irish person over the years.  These gents were doing their best but when the dancing started their vertical impairment kept them from joining in.  One started the “Y” for “YMCA” but toppled into the other man who was having difficulty forming a “C.” This went on through the first verse but with better judgment they sat out the second.

I don’t normally like beer and my husband doesn’t drink.  So naturally the biggest beer party on the planet became the favorite highlight of the year.  There is truly nothing more mouth dropping than walking into a “tent” and seeing 100,000 Germans in Bavarian Lederhosen dancing on plank picnic tables to the YMCA.  I wish I could have taken a picture.  No words can actually describe that moment in time. We stood in the two-story tent, mouths open, turning in a 360 degree, in a total flabbergasted state.  Germans, proud of their heritage, celebrating an event steeped in history for hundreds of years, dancing to the Village People.  Not a light foot among them.

We slept surprisingly well with no adverse affects. For lunch we headed to an all you can eat sushi place, the kids had told us about the night before.  We are in Germany so why not have sushi?  The sushi is on individual plates and you pick the one you want off the conveyer belt as it passes by.  I ate so much I thought I was going to have problems.  After naps, we headed back to Oktoberfest.  It was a 10-minute wait to get a table in one of the beer gardens.  Neither one of us was hungry so we got our beer and a Bavarian cheese tray.  We sat for a while and then a couple of guys sat down at our table speaking English.  It turns out that not only are they Western Students, but they live in our neighborhood.  We travel 10,000 miles all the way to Germany only to meet people from down the block of Kalamazoo.  They assured us our house was still standing.  We had a blast and after two more rounds we headed back to the hotel.

In retrospect, I realized that few countries don’t play YMCA, I figured out the subway system in German, and was totally comfortable striking up a conversation with perfect strangers.  What will I be able to do next?

Facts About Bavaria, Germany:
• Every person drinks 240L of beer a year.  This includes babies born in December.
• There is no point in trying to keep up.  You will lose.

Facts for Oktoberfest
• 14 main beer tents hold about 80,000 to 100,000 each.  There are lot of smaller ones.
• 980 toilets.
• 9.8 million liters of beer drank last year – they are trying for 10 million this year.
• You can only get a beer while sitting.  Doesn’t seem to matter where you are sitting as long as you are sitting.
• You drink beer while standing.
• The food is great, comes in American size portions, & dripping in either grease or beer.
• 51,488 bottles of water and lemonade and 3386 cups of coffee.
• Did I mention 980 toilets?