Oktoberfest

A pasture with cows, unending acres of corn, a small town in the distance. They were familiar to me, a different arrangement of the sights I knew from my home town. As I looked out the window I could almost convince myself that I was driving down Route 102. But I wasn’t. In fact, I was technically farther from home than I’d ever been. I was in Germany, on a train between Memmingen and Augsburg.

It was just past seven in the evening when Maggie, Alex and I arrived in Augsburg. Back in Barcelona, we commented, the sun would still be an hour away from setting. Here, though, we stepped out of the train station into the last few minutes of sunlight. It was getting colder, too, which only increased the strange-yet-familiar sensation we’d had ever since we’d arrive in Germany. We looked at maps and tram schedules and compared them to the directions to the hostel. The signs held the unlikely and, in some cases, impossible combinations of letters and symbols that make up German. These were not ‘strange-yet-familiar’; they were entirely strange. Very different from English, far from Spanish. Even Catalan would have been a reprieve. Still, we matched letter to letter, got some help from a local, and were checked into our hostel before it started to rain.

“Can you recommend a place where we can get some good food?” we asked the clerk behind the desk.

He set down his beer and raised his eyebrows. “German food?” We nodded. We were in Germany, after all. He smiled approvingly and said, “Konafonflanen.” We stopped nodding. He showed us on a map where the restaurant was. “It’s off this street, downstairs,” he continued. “Good food, and they brew their own beer.”

I had heard a K and an F. Maybe two F’s. My friends and I looked at each other in a kind of shared, imperceptible shrug. “Right,” I said. “Thanks, we’ll go there.” We took to the streets of Augsburg again.

The empty streets of Augsburg, it should be said. We had just come from a city that couldn’t imagine eating dinner before ten, and now we were the only ones out in a town that seemed to have rolled up the sidewalk at eight. With so little traffic- pedestrian or automobile- we soon found the street we were looking for, and not far down the block was a warm, yellow glow coming the bottom of a stairway. The sign read, “Konig Von Flandern”.

“I knew I heard an F.” We went inside.

The restaurant was split into several dining rooms, all covered in wood and warm light. They were also all filled wall-to-wall with people who appeared to be locals: old men, a few couples on dates, a few families. We looked around for some indication of what we should do. We had only recently accustomed ourselves to the do-it-yourself system of Spanish restaurants and bars. (Specifically: seat yourself, get the waiter’s attention yourself, order, and remind the waiter you ordered yourself.) Eventually, out of a lack of options, we found an empty table and sat down. If it was the wrong thing to do, we were sure someone would tell us.

A busy waitress stopped by and did not, as we’d feared, berate us in angry German. Instead she took our order. When we all ordered the same beer she blew us a dramatic kiss. “Thank you,” she said. “You are easy!”

While she was getting the beer, we looked at the menu… the way a second-grader might look at Hamlet.

“Hmm… I think this means ‘sausage’.”

“I think a lot of these mean ‘sausage’.”

“What’s Schwienshaxe?”

So when the waitress returned with the beer (delicious, much-needed beer) we did the only thing we knew, the thing that had gotten us here in the first place: we asked, “What do you recommend?”

“Oh, do you want an English menu?”

“No, that’s okay. Just what do you think we should get?” Slightly amused, she suggested a platter for two- which could easily feed three. I misunderstood when she mentioned a platter for two and tried to order another plate in addition.

“No,” she laughed, “trust me. This is enough for three.” She stuck out here hand and I shook it. “Trust me, I promise.”

After that I got the feeling that our enthusiasm and open-mindedness had made us a pet project of hers. She apologized that the meal would take longer than she thought and brought a basket of bread and a strange looking spread to go with it. “Very Bavarian,” she promised. I’m still not sure what we were eating (some sort of lard with nuts? Bits of meat?) but it was delicious. When we ordered another round, we suggested that we might like something, well, bigger. She smiled again, as if she knew just the thing. “How about…” She quickly looked around the dining room before snatching a ceramic mug from in front of someone at a nearby table. “How about a mug like this? Oktoberfest beer. We brew it here.” She brought out a dark beer that was even better than the first. And that’s not the mention the free shots of vodka. By the time the meal came, we were in high spirits.

And what a meal it was. A platter with four or five different kinds of meat over potato noodles, along with plenty of sauerkraut. We spent the next half hour trying everything out, pairing this sausage with this mustard, this bit of pork with sauerkraut, and pairing all of it with the Oktoberfest brew. I had wanted a good, representative meal in every country I visited, and this, four or five hours off the plane, was Germany.

* * *

The next morning, after a short train ride from Augsburg to Munich, we kicked off Oktoberfest… drearily. We arrived at eight in the morning and waited in the cold, steadily increasing rain for the doors of the Paulaner tent (where we were meeting the other half of our group) to open at nine. When the doors finally did open, the entire mass of people surged forward, and forward again. A few waves of people were let in.

And then the surging stopped. We stood in the rain, trying not to count the minutes. Hundreds of people were gathered outside the doors, holding their umbrellas over their heads in what we dubbed “Umbrella City”. The critical flaw of Umbrella City, however, is umbrella run-off. Standing in the wrong place at the wrong time was worse than actually being in the rain.

After more than an hour, spirits were low. Those who were in the tent would be crazy to leave it in this weather, and those of us outside were starting to feel crazy for waiting. A couple of us were starting to think that it might be better to leave Oktoberfest, hit up a few bars in Munich, and get out of the weather. We were starting to think it, but none of us wanted to be the one to say it. Maggie was the last to hold out, but even she was wavering.

“We’ll set a limit on it,” she said. “If we haven’t moved in another hour, we’ll go.” I agreed, and settled in for another hour until we could go find a bar.

After a moment, frustrated, one of us said, “We haven’t even moved an inch in an hour!” And then something miraculous happened: we moved an inch. Just an inch, but it was enough to renew our excitement. Soon we moved another inch, and then we found ourselves part of a mass of people heading toward the door. The door!

We entered into an explosion of people, people who had been exploding in song and cheers for more than an hour. We found our friends sitting with a lederhosen-and-dirndl-clad group of locals, made some new friends, and settled in have our first liter of strong, Paulaner beer.

The next 8 hours and four liters literally blurred together. It all seems to be one long memory punctuated by drinking songs, (“Ein prooooosit, ein prooooosit…”), laughter, and cheers. At one point I stood on the bench with everyone else in the room, lifting my enormous mug to a song I didn’t understand. I made eye contact with someone else at another table, and we nodded knowingly and slammed our glasses together. Christian, a guy from Germany who I’d just met that morning, put his arm around me and said, “This is a very special moment at Oktoberfest. Everybody is drunk, everybody is friends.” We were all very much both.