Lis and Tyler in Germany

In Germany, festivals abound. I cannot even tell you how many festivals we have happened upon in numerous cities. Even our small town of perhaps 200 people has had two or three festivals since we’ve been here. Festivals are held for all sorts of things, but my favorite are the celebrations of the season’s produce. Plum season brings several varieties of plum cakes, plum jam, plum juice and plum festivals. It’s wine season, I guess, and people are drinking “new wine” which tastes like fermented grape juice (not quite wine yet) and is sold in plastic jugs instead of bottles. And to celebrate wine, there are wine festivals. A few weeks ago we went to the biggest wine festival in the world (but really, where else do they have big wine festivals? California, but no. There’s wouldn’t be a festival. It’d be sophisticated. White table cloths, decanters, palate cleansers…). But the biggest festival of all is Oktoberfest.

Last weekend we embarked on an absolutely insane excursion. (Insane if you’re me and pretty much no part of the Oktoberfest is your cup of tea.) We left home at 5:45am to catch our 6:54 party train to Munich. The lobby of the still dark train station was full of an already drinking, mini-keg totting, rowdy crowd. The party train has three bar cars, one of which is fully equipped with a dance floor, DJ and flashing lights. (I am not kidding you. Die Bahn, the official German train company, has a party train. Sponsored by Bitburger.) So, six hours later an already drunk bunch of people stumble off the train and down the street to the fairgrounds. I’m proud to announce that while Tyler did indulge in the mandatory before-8am-Oktoberfest-kick-off-beer, we were sober and able to check our bag in the train station locker and enjoy the streets of Munich as we walked. For those of you who have never been to Oktoberfest, think Puyallup fair times 10, add 11 tents holding up to 8,000 people EACH, surround each tent by a beer garden holding at least that many more, take away drinking laws and inhibitions and you’ll have something close to what it looks like on a weekday morning. After standing for over an hour in a mob so tightly packed my feet weren’t always touching the ground, we made it into the beer garden. This was at about 1:30 or 2, which is apparently way too late to be getting started. It was already packed beyond capacity. We had our requisite liters of beer, a pretzel and a chicken, bought a t-shirt, went on a ride and made it back to the train station by 11:44 for our party train-ride home, which rolled into Landstuhl at 6am. We were home and back in bed just 25 hours after we left. It could have been a dream.