Nach den ersten Tag von Oktoberfest

Oktoberfest began yesterday. And we went, we being Molly and myself and other friends in the Junior Year in Munich program. And we walked right on through to the other side. The place was packed. Leading up to Oktoberfest, I had been hearing the stat that Munich, a city of 1 million inhabitants, swells as another 5 million come to party and drink. It was not hard to believe once I was there. Italians, Spanish, French, English, Irish, Americans, Australians, Chinese, Japanese all wearing their completely traditional dirndls and lederhosen and pressing in tight around you. While it's interesting to be amid such a mass, it does make the ordering of food and drink difficult. In order to order the traditional Maß, one liter glass stein, you must be sitting at a table. These tables, sitting about 14 each I believe, are located in 14 different tents, each operated by a different brewery. The largest tent had 8,000 tables, and the smallest 1,000. There were lines outside all of them, and those inside weren't exactly pounding down their drinks to make room for others. We ended up hitting an all-you-can-eat running sushi place I had found while looking for art galleries the previous Saturday. Did get to see one barmaid plow through the crowd to deliver 10 Maß, five in each hand and leaning back to take the weight on her body, to a table. It was all she could do to blow the whistle and get people to open a path.

The best American counterpart I can offer to this particular celebration is the state fair, only bigger and dirndls and lederhosen. Eliminate the competitive aspect with ribbons and shows and all that and shift the emphasis to the drinking, and you will have a fairly decent conception of what being there was like. There were some carnival style roller coasters and swing rides and a bunch of souvenir stores hawking T-shirts and stupid hats.

On the academic side, we finally finished with our paperwork for German residency and that critical but heinously boring stuff. Now we have one 2.5 hour class four times a week on such difficult subjects as "Living in Munich," "Studying at a German university," and "Current Events in Germany," the idea of these being to teach us how those little things like grocery shopping and formatting papers that one doesn't think so much about but can be quite different between nations.

Hope you're all enjoying Spokane or your respective new homes.

Später