Oktoberfest

The annual beer drinking festival in Munich actually happens in September, and ends on the first Sunday of October!

I landed there on a sunny afternoon, in traditional Bavarian attire – Lederhose and Jacket, with boots to boot! What a crowd!!!

Beautiful women in amazing dresses – also traditional – but fashionable still; amazing burst of color everywhere; and never ending one-liter mugs of beer! Of course you cannot blame the men for the little hooliganism that is bound to happen.

The festival place is close to the hauptbahnhof and you just have to follow the crowd to end up there. Traditional German Festival shops selling food and attire are the first thing that you’d notice. These are interspersed by rides – not the usual Mary-Go-Rounds but their more thrilling versions. This time even the free fall ride was present.

After you take in the enormous crowd, you’d notice the never ending “beer tents” which are really high roofed sheds, each stretching over almost a football field or may be more. Each brewery or ‘brauhaus’ has one and all of them are jam packed. Queuing begins for each of them as early as 7 AM and if you are lucky you can get in afterwards. I could not.

So I did the next best thing – got into a “beergarten” – which is the area in front of the tent. It’s almost the same as the tent only that it is in open and minus the live music! There are scores of benches and tables lined up, each served by a dedicated waiter. So, you just plop yourself on one of these and start guzzling.

Imagine a table with absolute strangers who begin talking with you immediately in a babble of all foreign tongues imaginable. My table had a Spanish, a German, a French, two Italians, two Chinese and several others a bit further way to which my only contact remained “Prost” – the Deutsch for cheers! Thankfully I had a Radler to drink - it looks like beer, is served similarly, has 2% alcohol, and is a saving grace on a table where you do not belong if you are not drinking!

One has to be there to know just how contagious the air is! With beer that is 8% alcohol and with drinking being the ONLY thing to do, people turn into such characters that you get entertained full on! There is singing, dancing, hugging, smooching, jumping, yelling, guffawing – merry-making full blast. Someone starts singing on one table, some one else joins in from two tables away and suddenly everyone is bellowing the same song. I yay-ed to the German lyrics which seem filled with a lot of Ale, Ole and similar non-words so that I did not feel too lost for words. I envied the people who were inside the tents. I did try getting in, but was not lucky. So I got back to my multinational table.

Yes, amid all this there is a little unpleasantness sometimes when some one too drunk or a brawly guy has to be evicted by security personnel. This happens pronto and people go back to their beer mugs. And when they get tired of drinking, they go out to one of the numerous lawns/gardens in the city to sleep some. You can see scores of people lying everywhere in all states of inebriation. And well, vomit is also a common sight!

I had a great day, and hopefully I can go there again next year. Now since I know the fun first hand, I’d be looking forward to the Oktoberfest 2010.