Oktoberfest!!!

From Bamberg we headed south to Munich (or Muenchen, as it's known here) to check out the biggest folk festival in the world, Oktoberfest. We didn't book a hotel many months in advance as is generally recommended, but we did manage to find something a mere three train stops away from the fairgrounds. (Although it did cost about three times as much as we'd normally consider paying.) Still, it was quite convenient, and made it easy to head out pretty early on the Tuesday to check out "family day".

The Monday before, when we arrived, Jeremi and I set out to buy some beer and some juice and chocolate for Karen, who was struggling with a cold. We took Owen with us to give them both some time to rest, and he was being so good that we even stopped at a restaurant for a beer in their patio, where he tried so hard to have a beer with us.
Just look at the longing in those little eyes! And it seems that he likes the Dunkelweizen just as much...
The restaurant was vietnamese, and we thought the menu looked good enough that we returned later for supper. Nothing like a big steamy bowl of pho to help you recover from a cold! That night we played some more euchre and drank some more beer, and prepared for the coming festivities. Oh, and Owen practiced crawling.
Finally the big day arrived. Getting off at the train station it was easy to figure out the route to the fairgrounds, as we had only to follow the hundreds of people going the same way. What was really shocking to us was how many people were wearing traditional Bavarian costumes - the dirndls and the lederhosen etc. I always saw pictures of this in the newspaper etc., but I figured it was just the people that they chose to take pictures of. In reality, it was a solid 40% of the people there. What was funny to us was also the number of teenagers who were fully decked out, and who didn't just dismiss it as being totally lame.
The sheer size of the place and the number of people was a little overwhelming. In addition to the beer tents there's also a whole load of carnival rides and food booths. And the "tents" are more like giant buildings, really.
Different breweries have their own tents, with different decorations outside. This one had a giant animated pig roasting on a spit over a moving fire...And the insides of the tents were pretty elaborate too...
...complete with elevated stages featuring "Volksmusik" bands numbering more than a dozen.
Owen was sleeping on the way in, but we tried to buy him a little Oktoberfest hat anyhow. The guy at the booth said that it would be too small for him, but we didn't listen. Luckily the guy was nice and let us exchange it for a bigger one on the way out (plus the difference in price).I also tried on a hat, but was able to resist the temptation...
Even if the hats were small, the beer and pretzels certainly weren't.

And of course Owen got his first sip of beer! Here he goes...
and the swallow...
...and then he was asking for more. Desipte his best efforts, he'll have to wait for next Oktoberfest for the second sip, I think.
And of course little Owen's charm odyssey didn't stop in Bamberg. Here is is meeting the table of men next to us, and making friends.There was another man at another adjacent table who talked to Jeremi for quite a while, although he didn't speak any English and Jeremi found his dialect a bit tricky. Nonetheless they were having a great old time, and Jeremi even tried out some of his snuff!
And of course he got to bounce Owen a little too.
Here Owen was having a sweet moment of wonderment with a helium balloon that had lost just enough gas so that, with the weight of the string, it was almost perfectly neutrally buoyant. Too bad it ends up looking like an ad for Merck.
Not everyone was having as good a time as us. My rather drunken brother insisted on getting a picture of this poor guy, who was already passed out outside the tent at around 2:00 pm.

After having a couple of litres of beer each we walked around the fairgrounds for a while, and Jeremi, Karen and I took a ride on one of the roller coasters. Then we walked over to this GIANT staute of a woman and her lion (representing Bavaria, I think), and hung out on the grass for a while and watched the people go by.But it wasn't just people! This patch of grass was also next to the road where decorated teams of horses pull in wagons carrying (probably fake) barrels of beer. Here I am checking out one of the horses, who had a good time sucking on my hand.

And Chris even managed to get a nice little video of one of the teams of horses going by, with their decked-out handlers.

And that was the end of Oktoberfest for us, though not the end of the day. We headed into Munich to check out some of the sights that evening, but for that you'll have to wait for the next post...