Oktoberfest

So, last night we attended Okto­ber­fest. Hon­estly, it was a lot like the Cal­gary Stam­pede to me – but a lot more fun. Maybe it’s a tourist thing.

There are fair grounds – rides, games, cheap sou­venirs and greasy food. Instead of cow­boy hats and boots though, women were dressed in bar­maid out­fits, and the men were dressed in Leder­ho­sen. And it lasts more than two weeks!

The beer steins you see above (which of course are the star of the fes­ti­val) are a LITRE in vol­ume. No, that’s not a typo. The look on my face in the photo above is a lit­tle bit of ter­ror. That’s way too much beer.

…But Brian was able to help me fin­ish mine. AND we were still able to find our hotel later. Believe me, it was an inter­est­ing trek!

Inter­est­ing fact – Okto­ber­fest was born in 1810. There was a royal wed­ding party that was so much fun, they decided to make it an annual thing.

Today we walked down to Marien­platz, which is the cen­tral ‘town square’ of Munich, and it has been since Munich was founded in the 12th cen­tury by a salt trader who burnt down his competition’s bridge, and built his own – forc­ing trade routes to shift to where he wanted them.

We are of course fas­ci­nated by the his­tory. There are some really weird lit­tle sto­ries about this place, and we love them!

Tonight we are try­ing to make a tough deci­sion… There are a cou­ple of cas­tles we REALLY want to see (Neuschwanstein and… the other one…), but it would take us a FULL day to get there and back to Munich, not allow­ing enough time to travel to a new des­ti­na­tion that night – and we are pay­ing 2–3 times more per night for lodg­ing here than we will any­where else. We could also leave Munich tomor­row and stay near the cas­tles tomor­row night (in Füssen), but then we are WAY off our planned track, and it could eat up some valu­able time and money get­ting back to where we want to be. Our other option would be to miss the cas­tles and head straight over to Salzburg (Aus­tria!) tomor­row, but it would be sad to miss the cas­tles. We know we can’t see it all, though – what­ever we decide will be the right choice, I know.

Last note – it is tech­ni­cally dif­fi­cult for us to post pho­tos from our good cam­eras up here, most of what we’re doing is from Brian’s iPhone when we stum­ble across wi-fi hot spots. Thus, the pho­tos you get are ones off his phone.