Oktoberfest

17 - 23 September, 2006

Only the Germans could think up a name for a festival held in September and decide to call it Oktoberfest! And only the Germans could organise such a festival which involves a dozen massive tents holding thousands of people, all drinking litres of perfectly brewed beer, eating gigantic pretzels, all wearing stupid hats and even stranger costumes.

Each day of the Beirfest in Munich consisted of deciding which tent we would tackle first, finding a table, ordering a couple of steins from an unattractive, big busted, super efficient, german barmaid and then getting to know the fellow drinkers you were surrounded by. One stein later we would all be singing aand dancing and sharing giant pretzels.

Every 10 minutes or so, the band would stop and sing a drinking song. Somehow this one drinking song did not become annoying even though it was repeated so frequently. It went:

Ein prosit, ein prosit der gemütlichkeit,
Ein prosit, ein prosit der gemütlichkeit,
Ein, zwei, drei, g'suffa
prost!

Translated to something like:

We're all getting drunk
We're all getting drunk
1,2,3 drink
Cheers!

Every now and then the band would also throw in an english song, but no matter which tent and which band you saw, they all had the same small repertoire of english songs, including: 'Hey hey baby, uh ah, I wanna know, if you'll be my girl,' 'Country roads,' 'New York, New York,' or 'YMCA'. Tragic!

So I came home with a stein glass and a cold. My diet of pretzels, sausages, weiner snitzels and multivitamin tablets probably didn't help the immune system avoid the cold. Couldn't have had anything to do with the amount of beer consumed either...

Janelle and I spent two days in Salzburg, a short train ride over the border in Austria. It is the home of the Sound of Music and the country side was stunning. So much grass which I wanted to cut up and post home for the cows to eat. We also got a glimpse of the Road Cycling World Championships and a junior break dancing competition, saw all the places of importance in the Sound of Music movie and ate more schnitzel! Fi wasn’t with us, so when it came to posing at the rotunda from the Sound of Music where two people from the movie have their first kiss (apparently a famous rotunda?) I had to settle to have my first kiss with the tour guide, classic!