UrbanSeven

I’m Back from my trip to Oktoberfest in München, Deutschland …and it was a blast!

I left early Saturday morning, the cab was late and it took ages to get to the airport but the flight was only 1.5hrs so it wasn’t long before I arrived in Munich. The campsite was next, where I planned to meet up with everyone, drop my bags and head off to the Beerfest as Saturday was the opening day and first drinks were only a hour or so before.

After a short free shuttle bus to the grounds I was there and it was amazing. I have never seen anything like it in my life, a sort of cross between the Ekka and a pub crawl but on a much much larger scale. The beer tents (or massive halls with gigantic beers or lions on the top of them) were packed to the brim and you couldn’t get a seat any where, even outside of them was packed. I think there would be been between 150 and 200,000 people there and almost everyone was drinking…fantastic.

The first day I met up with Emily and her friends some who were also staying at the camping grounds, it was lucky as they had arrived at 9am that morning (although still not able to get inside) managed to secure a nice table outside a beer hall and we all got completely wasted on Oktoberfest beer (it’s like 6.7%).

Sunday I got up early and had the included breakfast at the campsite, it was utterly disgusting! So I packed up and headed straight into Oktoberfest at 9am and it was significantly quieter which gave me the opportunity to go inside most the beer tents and see which is the best. The day slowly turned into a drunken mess as you would expect, I met up with more and more people and by the end of the day at the Hofbräu-Festzelt (the Hofbrauhaus tent) we had like 15people at our table.

On Monday I ventured into the city centre, Marienplatz. I lost my bennie the night before (as I seem to do every time I holiday anywhere) so I got a new one and a scarf from ‘NewYorker’ - an awesome store that is in Europe but not London. Anyway after I checked out the Hofbrauhaus and it was full went again went back to Oktoberfest and got drunk.

Tuesday I got up early and went to the BMW Museum, something I missed on my last trip to Munich as it was closed. It took quiet a long time to go through but was really interesting, I will put up the photos soon.
After that we all caught the train and then a bus out to Dachau, the site of the first Nazi German Concentration Camp. It was really eerie but very interesting, we were there for almost 3hrs as there was an insane amount of information to soak up …as bad as I felt it was definitely beer time.
We ended the day back at the Hofbrauhaus for steins and pork knuckle.

Wednesday it was all over and I had to head back to the airport to catch my flight home, I would have liked some more time off but I don’t know if I could handle anymore beerfest.

Check Oktoberfest page from the gallery section soon. Also some interesting facts from Oktoberfest last year. 6.9 Million litres of beer!!!

_B

Oktoberfest numbers (2007)

• Area: 103.79 acres (0.42 km²)
• Seats in the festival halls: ca. 100,000
• Visitors: 6.2 million
• Beer: appr. 6,940,600 litres (126,900 litres non-alcoholic)
• Wine: 79,624 litres
• Sparkling wine: 32,047 litres
• Coffee, tea: 222,725 litres
• Water, lemonade: 909,765 ½ litres
• Chicken: 521,872 units
• Pork sausages: 142,253 pairs
• Fish: 38,650 kg
• Pork knuckles: 58,446 units
• Oxen: 104 units,
• Expenditure of electricity: 2.8 million kWh (as much as 14% of Munich’s daily need or as much as a four person family will need in 52 years and 4 months)
• Expenditure of gas: about 205,000 m³
• Expenditure of water: about 90,000 m³ (as much as 27% of Munich´s daily need )
• Waste: 678 t (2004)
• Toilets: about 980 seated, more than 878 metres of urinals and 17 for disabled persons.
• Telephones: 83, also for international credit cards.
• Lost property: about 4000 items, among them 260 pairs of glasses, 200 mobile phones, a wedding ring and two crutches.^[12]