Fortunately for us we had a Sydney-turned-Munich local with us who reminded us that the window for Oktoberfest beer tent space reservations is in December the year before. Basically, unless you know someone (who may know someone), forget about a reserved table. Problem: No table = no service = no beer. Solution: Queue up by 8.30am for a 9am start. QED.
We were staying about a half hour train ride from Theresienwiese and since the flight was delayed we didn’t make it to bed until 1am. Being the least fond of mornings of anyone I know, watching people down steins at 9.15am was somewhat disconcerting, but amusing at the same time. I think there is also some sort of rule where if you’re inside at a table you must be drinking, so you can imagine the sinking feeling I got when the beer put down in front of me (needless to say, someone else drank it).
Eating pretzels and weisswurst (the Munich white sausage) mid-morning was a bit of a novelty too, especially the bit where deskinning of the sausage is required as the skin is indigestible.
A few other interesting (to me) things I was told about beer / Oktoberfest:
- There are only 6 local brews that are allowed to be sold at Oktoberfest: Hofbrau, Augustine, Paulaner, Hacker-Pschorr, Spaten, Lowenbrau. The seventh Munich brew is Airbrau – yes, the airport has its own brewery. And why ever not?! Kumulus is such a cool name for a beer. Unfortunately I forgot to check whether stratus, altostratus or cirrus were on the list.
- The pope is from Munich and Augustine Edelstoff is his favourite beer. It is so prized that the Vatican is the only place that it gets exported. We did try and get our hands on some pope’s beer but alas as the wrong time of year… the only Augustine beer on offer was Oktoberfest flavour, presumably created especially for this two weeks.
- The biggest proportion of visitors to Oktoberfest are from Australia. Over time, drunken Australians with lost passports became such a problem that a guy was sent from Berlin every year to set up a temporary consulate (embarrassment much?!) for the duration of Oktoberfest. Though I presume this was awhile ago though since a quick check of the DFAT website gives an address of a consulate in Munich.
Back to the Oktoberfest experience. By 12pm myself and a couple of others had had enough and ventured outside. The number of people and the size of the place was intense, apparently it was like Sydney Royal Easter Show on steroids (not that I can comment since I’ve never been to the Easter Show). In any case, the fair ground was as packed outside as it was in a beer tent, and it started to rain, but fortunately I had a giant fairy floss to make everything better. In fact I was feeling so uplifted by the sugary goodness that Miss E and I decided to go on a baby ride as well. Before you laugh, we did briefly consider the adult version of the ride but as we got closer the I'm-too-old-for-this factor crept in. Besides, can you imagine how cold it would have been swinging around ~20m or so up in the air?
I'd love to be able to say that we finished off the day by going back for another beer, however there was no possibility of that given the rain and crowds at the beer tents (and the lack of desire by this point!)
Rite of passage complete, the next crowd battling effort was going to be at the train station back to the hotel, where I promptly went to the land of nod for the next couple of hours and spent the rest of the night recuperating.
Fortunately for me, there was gingerbread on hand to help, thanks Mr T! More on the rest of Munich (and the food there) another day...
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