Deustchland or bust! München Edition

Monday September 22 2008 - Wednesday September 24 2008

Karen and I left Gunnar, Iris, and Yanina on Monday morning. Thanks to Iris, we found out about a special kind of regional public transportation ticket (Bayern ticket?) that we could use to get us on a train from Nürnberg to München and also on the U-Bahn an S-Bahn in München. She saved us a bunch of euros.

We had some time to kill before our train left so we walked around the train station in Nürnberg, Really we were looking for the most interesting sweets at various bakeries in the station. There was a little shop/stall that sold sausages too. I'm not talking about little cooked sausage on a roll. I'm talking about big hunks of sausage and the kind of sausage that's ready to eat, like kielbasa or salami. That looked awesome. I didn't get any though.

I'm going to digress a bit. Most of the train ride to München was spent playing Professor Layton and the Curious Village which is a gameboy DS game. I started playing a few months ago and figured I could finish it during September. Karen started looking at what I was doing when playing this game on the plane ride to Prague. She and I would try to solve puzzles together. We are each good at solving different kinds of puzzles which means we make a good team. There are some puzzles that I'm staring at and trying to get all mathematical/logical to solve. You can see smoke coming out of my ears. But Karen has the answer before I get a chance to pick my nose more than once. Anyhoo, the point is the game is fun and we have fun playing it together.

Back to our trip.

Some readers may be wondering at this point, why are they going to Munich at this time? Don't they know it is Oktoberfest season? That's exactly why we were going. Karen had a thing for going to it. That's part of why we planned our Prague 2008 to be during September.

Despite its name, most of Oktoberfest occurs in September and lasts for two weeks. Many cities hold celebrations, not just Munich. The first Oktoberfest was held on October 12 1810 in honor of the marriage of crown prince Ludwig (later King Ludwig I) to Princess Therese von Sachsen-Hildburghausen. The festivities were closed with a horse race and in the following years the horse races were continued and later developed into what is now known as the Oktoberfest. Karen and I did not see any horse racing, just horses pulling the beer wagons .

Nowadays during Oktoberfest Munich gets mobbed by foreigners in addition to lots more German folk. Hotel prices go up (ok that part sucks but what are you gonna do). I didn't want to go really. Looking back now, I'm glad we went. It was awesome. You can tell from our Oktoberfest pictures how much fun we had at the beer tents. I did have a little too much fun and paid for it the following day. Though I'm going to blame it on the pickle and the guy who sold it to me. It couldn't have been the couple liters of beer ... nah.. no way. I should of stuck to pretzels .

The following day we stayed in until I felt better. I watched more BBC news and CNN international news than anyone should ever need to see. We went out around lunch time and explored Oktoberfest fully. The previous day we made a beeline for the beer tents and didn't see much else. We looked in some more tents and they seemed to be pretty much the same. Lotsa reserved tables, people, smoke, and beer. Each tent had a live band. The rest is like a large fair/carnival. There are roller coasters, fun houses, and bumper cars. Food stands. Souvenir stands. Hucksters trying to sell stuff like ez-choppers for food, slinky worms, etc... Some games like tossing hoops on targets and air gun target shooting. Coffee stands that served cappucinos and espresso. Shot stands that served shots, shooters, mixed drinks. You could walk up and order a woowoo or shot of jager just like you would order an espresso! After we walked around the free part of Oktoberfest, we decided to move on. We did not go into the pay part which was basically a farmers fair with livestock, tractors, etc... It cost like 8 euros to get in.

After Oktoberfest, we explored a little bit of Munich. We went to Marienplatz which is tourist central and then walked towards something called Viktualmarket or something. Basically an outdoor food market. Lots of cheeses, wines, honey, crafts, bakers, etc...

We left Munich for Prague the next morning. The train ride back to Prague was about seven hours. There was a delay crossing the border between Germany and Czech Republic. And there was a huge delay Plzen for some uknown reason. Waiting for a connection? Tracks weren't open? Conductor ran out of beer and had to go out to get more?

So Karen and I had a great trip to Nurmberg and Munich. It was a good little vacation. I'd suggest visiting Oktoberfest for sure if you have any interest in it at all.