OKTOBERFEST & Germany

Disclaimer: My English writing skills are suffering due to only speaking and writing in Spanish now..so don’t judge my writing…lol

Oktoberfest! OMG I don’t even know where to begin. This was one of the best weeks of my life and a true adventure. We started out in Barcelona for a day because we couldn’t get a direct flight to Munich from Madrid there we did some sight seeing and resting for Germany. Once we got to Germany we took a train because our airport was about two hours away from our hostel and the festivities. It was practically a party in the train all the Germans were dressed up in their lederhosen (German traditional outfits) drinking beer and eating sausage on the train.

Our hostel was called Easy Palace City Hostel and it was literally 3 minutes walking to Oktoberfest. People from all over the world were staying in the hostel, the way it works is that you pay for a bed in a room and the rooms have 8 beds so you don’t know the other people sleeping in there until you see them and we rarely ever saw them because no one stayed in their room during the day. We stayed in the Easy Palace hostel the whole time and only paid for the first two 2 nights we were able to get away with this because they give wristbands to people staying in the hostel and a security guard checks wristbands when you go in and out of the hostel so we just never took our wristband off from the first day. We put our luggage in the luggage room and basically lived out of there. It was funny because every time we asked for the luggage room key we would get our stuff freshen up in the bathrooms that were in the halls and return the luggage room key looking different we made friends and slept on the floor when we didn’t pay but we didn’t care because when your that drunk you can sleep anywhere right? The even better part of the story is that the manager of the hostel loved me and he would give us free alcohol at the bar in the hostel he had no idea we were not paying to stay there and getting free booze, basically we milked the Easy Palace Hostel.

So the actual Oktoberfest is the most incredible beer drinking experience ever and I think anyone that likes beer should experience it at least once. It is a huge festival with tons of cool rides and each brand of German beer has it’s own tent, well they call it a tent, but each one holds thousands of people. The tents are the party there are a ton of longs tables, you have to be at a table to get served the beer, usually people get reservations on the tables we didn’t have any reservations, but we never had a problem finding people that would let us join their table. Usually you just stand on your table people only sit in the beginning but all the tents are rowdy by 4pm. The Germans really got it right when it comes to beer they love it and their beer or bier like they would say tastes so good and it is a lot stronger than any beer I have ever had. I think I’m going to be ruined after this experience and not like any other beer besides German beer. It’s almost impossible to drink more than 6 beer steins unless your German of course they drink everywhere all day and you only have to be 16 do drink and you can drink in public. Their beer has no preservatives so it’s technically considered food in Germany and that’s why it’s allowed to have it anywhere. The whole event is also family friendly there are tables with kids too, I’m definitely bringing my family when I’m older. I got drunk off of two steins I never had more than three, but each one is a liter. The whole time at the Oktoberfest everyone is singing and doing cheers at the top of their lungs it is truly the happiest atmosphere you feel joyful the whole time. Each tent also has a live German band that sings the songs and the PROST CHEER comes on about every 15 minutes…PROST! means CHEERS! I enjoyed everything OKTOBERFEST has to offer drank a ton of fabulous beer, ate oversized pretzels and lots of sausage, sang German songs in German and even got on the rides drunk I felt like I was at THE REAL HAPPIEST PLACE ON EARTH!

I love Germany it’s a beautiful country and the German people are awesome. This was my first time going to a country where I didn’t know the language because I have only been to places where they speak English or Spanish, but I didn’t have any problems because a lot of the Germans either speak English or if they don’t they will still try to help you some way, they are very nice people. It’s amazing how much they can drink a police officer was talking to us at the train station and he saw us with our 4 cases of beer and he said 5 beers to get drunk, then he heard us speak and realized we were American and said oh American 2 beers to get drunk. It was funny because the Germans definitely beat us when it comes to drinking. One guy was sitting next to us on the subway and he had a briefcase we thought it was for work but then he pulls out a beer from it we were surprised to see that it was hilarious.

During the day we would go site seeing, we went to a concentration camp called Dachau it was an eye opening experience and also an emotionally hard experience. Being there and seeing the actual gas chamber with a sign on the outside that says washroom was intense and where they burned people was a hard sight to see. I can’t believe that people could be that evil when you see the sights it really hits you how awful the holocaust was. The fences had the most intense barbed wire I have ever seen in my entire life, a way to make it impossible for the prisoners to escape. The concentration camp was enormous and it was only the part that was left of the original one it was a sad place.

Ok now moving on to not so sad things, we also did a bicycle tour of Munich it was a big, black and yellow contraption that held 12 people with a bar in the middle it was called a bike because we all had to pedal so I guess it was technically a bike. It reminded me of something you would see in Cancun..lol..and the tour guide was something else he apparently thought he was a comedian and kept telling us jokes. We bumped music from one of our ipods and got to see all of Munich it was beautiful there were two huge Catholic Cathedrals that were amazing and we got to see the exact spot where Hitler stood and gave his speeches. There was also an area called dodgers alley where people against Hitler would walk a round a bout way through an alley to avoid walking through the main street because in the main street they were obligated to do a Nazi salute or go to jail if they refused, the road is now painted Gold as a tribute and you can see it in one of my pictures. We also got to visit the famous English Beer Gardens in Munich. This is one of the largest parks in Europe it use to be the backyard to the King and Queens palace. It’s a gorgeous park it’s split up by a river and on one side it’s a regular park and the other is a nudist park where people like to go and take in the sun. It was nice and relaxing we got beer from the beer garden and ate some more German food.

One of the days we took an unexpected trip to a place called Lindau. We were on the train on our way to see the famous Neuschwanstein Castle which is suppose to be very beautiful when the man that checks the train tickets advised us not to go there and go to Lindau instead. He told us Lindau was a better place to go than the castle his exact words were, “If you want to stand behind 50 Koreans and in front of 50 Japanese people to take a picture go to the castle if not go to Lindau.” It was hilarious, but true and we thought if this is advice coming from a German then let’s go to Lindau. It was a 3-hour journey to get there but we came prepared with 4 cases of beer and pretzels. Once we got there it was all worth it Lindau is a beautiful island off of Germany it is only connected by a bridge and the train. From Lindau we were able to see Austria and Switzerland from a distance it use to be a very important exchange area in the old days. You could take a short fairy and be at these countries, but we didn’t do it because we only had two hours to explore and we wanted to eat German food in Lindau. It was the most relaxing place I have ever been to and there weren’t many tourist at all it was nice to just walk around and feel the breeze from the water.

Germany was AMAZING and I can’t wait to go back again!