Munchen Oktoberfest!

So I supposed I couldn't come to Germany during Oktoberfest and not attend the festivities taking part throughout the country. So naturally, we decided to go to Munich, the biggest and bestest of said festivities. So we hopped a train to Munich at around 8am, knowing full well we wouldn't get into one of the crazy drunk tents. But seeing as we had to leave that evening for Venice, we had no desire to be drunk and lost at Oktoberfest. We thought we would just go to check it out and grab a beer and a pretzel. I soon learned that Stephanie had promised her new German friend that she would acquire him one of the giant glass mugs they serve the beer in, which was not as easy as anticipated. 

We get to Munich and have to deal with storing our stuff somewhere, which involves us waiting in a long line to pay 5 euros to throw our bags into some sort of bag check, but we were awarded chocolates while in line so it was worth it. We then ventured out into the masses of people to find all of the tents and such. What I had not realized about Oktoberfest is that it is actually a giant fair with rides and shops and tons of food, not just people drinking in giant tents. So there were a bunch of rides and games and it was like one huge carnival. Then we thought, well maybe we can get into one of these tents. After waiting outside for an hour or so and only seeing 2 people get let in and many people get thrown out (most of which were either drunkenly crying or cupping handfuls of their own vomit), we decided we didn't want to chance our clothing to someone else's puke and thought trying a biergarten (the outside area surrounding the tent) would be a better solution to obtaining the coveted glass mug. 

Getting into a biergarten was a bit easier, but we still had to fight our way through a pretty dense crowd only to find that inside the only people who were sitting were being served beer. And needless to say, those people were not giving up those seats. So after a bout of frustration and confusion we stumbled upon a little annexed area of the biergarten, and miraculously there was a beer lady with 3 giant mugs full! We held out money and were given the beer! The beer was pretty good, I'm not really a fan of beer, so that's saying something. And we managed to sneak the 1 Liter glasses (which cost about $13 when full with beer!) out with us. It was an exhausting experience with the insane crowds of people but well worth seeing. I would opt to go to a smaller version next time I think to avoid utter chaos at all points in time. It wasn't as much fun as it was stressful to make sure we didn't lose each other and trying to figure out how to get the beer and how to avoid getting puked on or shoved to the ground in the crowd. But we survived, so I suppose we were successful. 

Pictures to come soon!