Oktoberfest!

It’s the happiest time of the year for Bavarians!

No, not Christmas; Oktoberfest! Beer, sausages, giant pretzels, and women in dirndls! What more could one ask for?

My parents made the trip out, and experienced it with me; it was fantastic having them around.

We arrived early to see the parade going in. When they deliver the beer to Oktoberfest, they don’t just have some scruffy guy wheeling it in on a dolly. No, they do that with class.

Appropriately, the beer wagons are accompanied by musicians.

Eventually, we wandered inside. The Oktoberfest grounds are essentially a large park on which they erect large “tents”. I use that term in quotes because these tents would be considered the Taj Mahals of the tent world. Really, they’re more like full-blown buildings.

Alas, these tents are dominated by tables with reserved seating, and we were not able to find open seats. When the weather is fair, this isn’t a problem, because there’s plenty of uncovered outdoor seating. But when the weather’s like this:

Well, no one wants to sit outside and drink their dunkel lager in that.

We were getting wet, and it was cold, and there were no seats we could find. We wandered, hoping to find something. In a back alley, we found no seating, but we did stumble across some of those beer delivery horses.

I had actually given up hope. We were sick of getting rained on, and decided just to head into the city and find a table at a restaurant. We were just going to pop in, use the latrine, then head into the heart of Munich. But the little tent we found turned out to be a full-blown restaurant. With seating available.