After our 8 hour train ride / sleep catchup Tim and I arrived in Munich around 6pm and walked the half hour stroll to the hotel we had booked about a year prior to our trip where we met up with Macky again and Jo. After a couple of hours of comparing tales (Tim and I totally won), we went to find food and got ourselves some kebabs and beer from a nearby kebab shop. The kebabs were awful, cold, tasteless and tiny, but the beers were Franziskaner; cold, delicious and large which made up for it. Over the course of the 4 nights and days of Oktoberfest we managed to cover just about every available surface of our hotel room with these bottles. Around 10-11pm Lewis rocked up and we were all together at last. I should note that it was a 4 person room, luckily Macky and Jo count as one single person for sleeping and drinking purposes.
The next day, being Tim's birthday, began as appropriately as it could have, a 7am beer alarm so we could shower, have breakfast and still make it into the Oktoberfest grounds by 9am.
Oktoberfest is something very hard to describe, it is like a larger, considerably more majestic Sydney Royal Easter Show, except tailored to beer drinking alcoholics (I'm not an alcoholic, alcoholics go to rehab and rehab is for quitters!) rather than farmers. It is a huge series of beer tents, each with its own outdoor beer garden and indoor band stage, broken by rides, roller coasters and food (roast ox rolls, 50cm long sausages etc) and merchandise (silly hats and souvenir steins) stalls. We spent about half an hour wandering, wide eyed with awe, before at 9:30 we stumbled on a girl passed out, being tended by ambos, and realised that we had some catching up to do so we headed into the first beer garden we didnt have to line up for (yup, that early) for steins, which are $10 each.
We were shortly after joined by Lance, Tim and I's mate who now lives in Brisbane, and his mate Nick, and then befriended by a group of girls based on the fact that it was one of their birthdays also. One of which was a ranga who proceeded to cry to Macky about how "there used to be 4 types of freshwater dolphins and now there's only 3 *waaaaaah*".
After a large period of drinking, during which Tim at one point had 3 steins on the go and I managed to cheers so enthusiastically that I broke my stein, we all got separated. Lewis and Tim had a fight, Lance and Nick disappeared andJo went back to the hotel room then got lost and scared before finally finding Macky. I ended up going in search of Tim but stumbled on Lance instead and after a frustrating hour of trying to meet up with others who were "by the huge statue" which we were unable to find we just headed into a beer tent and spent the rest of the evening dancing drunkenly on tables with the rest of the tent to the band playing.
On the drunk walk back to the hotel I discovered the huge statue. It was appropriately huge and remarkably obvious. Oops.
Once back at the hotel we all managed to regroup, the only noteable tale being that of Tim, who was drugged and came to about an hour from the festival grounds in the wrong direction, minus his previously bought hat and his shirt and completely sober, then much needed bed.
The next morning, after breakfast and feeling happily un-hungover, we spent relaxing in the hotel room, having a few quiet beers and playing Munchkin before crossing the road to a pub for huge schnitzels for lunch. After lunch and a couple more beers we headed into the festival in early evening to try and properly experience the tents at night, which only I had made the previous night. With dinners of ox burgers or pork steak sandwiches under our belts we headed into the Paulaner tent where we stayed, drinking and dancing on the tables and stools, until it closed.
On closing Macky discovered that he had lost his much loved jacket and then on leaving Jo was groped and harassed by some drunk idiot until I pushed him away and told him to fuck off. This resulted in a somewhat unhappy group walking back to the hotel and began the saga of Macky and his jacket.
The next morning we had a fantastic sleep in, just made the 11am free breakfast cutoff and then inquired how much the hotel was owed. This was the point where we paniced slightly, did the maths, trawled through our emails to find the booking made a year ago and verified that yes, we did infact agree to pay that much per night.
To distract ourselves from this awful detail we called Lance and headed back into Oktoberfest to meet up with him and Nick again. The others went to check for Macky's jacket at lost and found while Tim and I went and found Lance, Nick and their mates Brad and Andy. After about a steins length of time the others rejoined us, minus the jacket, and we got the day going properly.
At 3pm, when the majority of tables were booked out, we went outside where we were told we could only sit if we ordered food so, realising that this was a genious idea, we got a round of pork knuckles, which were huge and obscenely good. Nick also broke out his little box (which were sold all over the place) of snuff, which I sampled a little of and was just a bit of a minty feel but really wakes you up.
We then managed to somehow find Simon, who Tim and I hung out with in Bruges, who came and joined us for a while, but lost Macky and Jo who headed back to the hotel, Macky still unimpressed by the loss of his jacket. The rest of us headed back inside the tent around 6 where Tim proceeding to befriend a table of very gay men who he kept telling us were "really nice" but were quite clearly, at least to the rest of us, taking turns making plays for him. We were stood on the other side of a small wooden railing, refusing to join him, and spent a while talking with various people, including a canadian who kept dancing around and an English girl who worked as a lap dancer.
After a bunch more drinking and and table dancing all that remained was Lance, Nick, Brad and I and we left when the tents closed, my final moments in the glorious, debauched bonanza that is Oktoberfest.
We left together and then went our separate ways as we split off to our different destinations and I ended up joined by a bunch of germans for the walk back.
The next morning we said our farewells to Tim and then walked to the station to jump on our bus to Prague.
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