timlog

Since I’m heading out on a trip to Puerto Rico tomorrow, its a good time to actually blog this forever in progress post. It only details the first weekend of our Europe trip, but at least its something.

In the beginning of October, Cindy and I flew across the Atlantic to soak in the sights of middle/eastern Europe (and satisfy Cindy’s annual “I must leave the country” requirement). I wasn’t super keen on the idea originally, but she warmed me up to it and I figured I’d give this traveling thing a try.

Oggie had already picked up our rental car so we hit the road toward Munich on Saturday morning. We stopped along the way at a few small towns (Durnstein, Krems, Melk, Salzburg, Friesing … no pics up yet of those). The towns were nice, Krems had some kind of political festival going on where people were carrying around colored balloons representing their favored candidate (Bush probably would be yellow, right?). Salzburg had some nice views and a human-sized chess board (that people were actually playing). We also swung by the oldest brewery in the world (11th century!)… they even had a Weihenstephaner das boot.

We got to Munich in the evening and parked in a garage outside the gates of Oktoberfest. It didn’t take long for us see where the party was going on since there were thousands of people out and having a good time. It seemed like most of them had been partying all day long, but fortunately not too many people were doing stupid things :)

All of the beer tents (and by tent I mean 5000 person wooden structure) were packed to the gills, but we got lucky and squeezed ourselves into the Löwenbräu beer hall (pic). There is no doubt, we were the only sober people in there. The inside was lined with people standing on tables, singing and dancing (and drinking) their hearts out. The funny thing (if thousands of drunken dancing people isn’t funny enough) was that Löwenbräu was the “rock” beer tent — meaning that pretty much all the music was english and stuff we could sing along to. Unfortunately I can’t remember the exact songs, but I do know there was some good ol’ John Bovi (I’ve given in to my incessant mumbling of his name). Unfortunately we were only starting to really get into full swing (after two liters of beer) when the hall started to close at 11:30. Bummer.

The carnival atmosphere continued to live on after the tents closed. Particularly we were drawn to the a mob of guys staring into the fun house. We learned that Drunken men + women in Bavarian dresses + an unexpected floor updraft in the funhouse = a really enjoyable 15 mins.

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