Munich and Oktoberfest

3. Oktober

Hey all! Well, wouldn't you know it.... ready? here it comes.... today is actually the first day in over a month where.... (gasp!) I have NO PLANS!

Huzzah!!! (crowds swing handkerchiefs and throw hats)

Don't get me wrong, this last month has been amazing. But oh my goodness, it has also been, just... exhausting! Every day there was some reason to set the alarm clock, even on weekends. I was beginning to find myself running on fumes... I posted pictures from Anna's and my weekend in München yesterday, and boy, looking at those pics, I was really starting to get a bit haggard! But today is the nationally observed Wiedervereinigung (German Re-Unification), and so there's no school. And since it's the middle of the week, there is no traveling on the docket; and consequently, here it is one in the afternoon, and the only thing I've accomplished is to get up late, make tea, IM with Michael, go back to bed, wake up again at 12.30, and make some chicken soup and then more tea as I listen to the first rainy day of the season outside. Oh! And the second time I woke up, I woke up to the sound of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” flowing down from the Hamanns upstairs – Brigitte was watching a reunification celebration/address on TV, and so I got the pleasure of starting the day with the most beautiful music ever written. Ahhhhh! Take that, dark circles! (Not that I don't have *tons* that I should be doing today, but I can just do 'em all on my own schedule. :) )

But wow, what a weekend! Last Friday, Anna came up to Neustadt and we took a night-tour of the town in all its beautiful lantern-lit glory. Every day I'm here I fall more and more in love with this place! The tour was led by a very enthusiastic, dramatic guide in period clothing, and he took us around to all the major historical points of interest in the lovely Innenstadt. Some of the houses around here are 700 years old! He showed us buildings, notches in walls and engravings in arches, and even a couple of murals which I'd never noticed (or just never thought about) as I'd walked by, and told us the fascinating stories of their origins, and all about daily life of hundreds of years ago and major historical events that are now imprinted in the city all around us. Every corner and stone in this town is just singing with history! We walked down these narrow cobblestone streets, glowing golden and dim in the light of old-fashioned lanterns, closely flanked by asymmetrical Fachwerk buildings with light peeping from behind their shutters, all absolutely covered in bushy grapevines, while the dark sky above was twinkling with stars... and I had to just stop and touch a wall to make sure everything was real. I must have been wandering around with my mouth hanging open. It was... unbelievable. I can't believe my luck at having landed in such a magical place.

So anyway! That was over at about 9 pm, and on the way home, Anna and I passed through the Weinlesefest, the first night of a two-week-long Winecountry carnival held in the plaza outside of the Hauptbahnhof (main train station). It's fun, but not as neat as the preliminary celebrations we went to when Steve and Shauna were here. This is a bit more carnival-like, and so it looks pretty from afar but is just a bunch of bright lights and crowds up close. However, we did think it would be cool to stick around for the crowning of the Pfälzische Weinkönigin (Wine-Queen of the Pfalz); but what with having to get up at six the next morning, and having been running off an average of 5 hours of sleep per night for the entire previous week, we decided just to head home. It was a good thing, too, 'cause by the time we were actually asleep it was well past 11!

We got up, as planned, at six the next morning, and caught our train to München right on time. ICE's are so fast and comfy! We got there in about 3.5 hours! (And I should mention that we happened to sit across from Adonis on the train. He was an engineering student at the Universität Karlsruhe, and reading a biography of Einstein while he traveled home to the Bodensee. I didn't know Adonis was from the Bodensee!)

The Munich train station was packed! It was the last weekend of Oktoberfest, and so everyone was coming in and no one was leaving. A couple buddies of mine from Arizona are both doing an exchange year in Munich, and so it was one of them – Nico Cuevas – who picked us up at the Hauptbahnhof. He was such a great host! Nico is awesome; he was actually a former German 101 student who just kind of charmed the whole German department and became sort of our department pet. He's very much the gentleman and also a real riot to hang out with. He had gone to Ikea the day before to buy a floor mattress and some extra sheets, and he slept there while Anna and I yin-yanged on the bed. THANK YOU NICO!!!

But I'm getting ahead of myself – first, we dropped our stuff off at his dorm room (in a lovely part of the city) and then went to the main square, the Marienplatz, to rustle us up some Essen. Just like the train station, the Marienplatz was absolutely stuffed with people. We waited in quite a line to get a Bratwurst, Brezel, and Paulaner Hefeweizen (ahhh!), and then, finding no place to sit, we ate our lunch perched on some dollies lined up outside one of the shops. Did I mention the city was packed?? Later that night, we even saw heaps of drunken Oktoberfest celebrators sleeping on the ground, on sidewalks, in the train station, etc. – and no policeman seemed to bat an eye. The whole city seems pretty tolerant in general of the Oktoberfest crowds.

After lunch, Anna and I were just falling over from sleepiness, so Nico set us up all comfy to take a nap and then went and ran some errands while we snoozed for a good hour and a half. I mean, talk about sweet – here we were, coming all the way into Munich to hang out with him, and then we wanted to just crash in the middle of the day. But he warned us that we'd probably be out all night, and so a nap would be a very good investment. Plus he's a big supporter of the siesta, anyway – after all, the kid is from Hermosillo, Sonora! ;)

After a nap, we all munched on some Nutella and apples (mmm!) and got ready to go out. Nico, being part Italian, had just spent six weeks running around Italy, and so his Italian is terrific. (I should mention, the guys speaks just about four languages! Spanish and English like native; Italian almost fluently; and his German is getting better by the day!) He's also ultra-gregarious, and so of course he ended up getting into a conversation with a couple of young Italians on the train to the beerhall. They exchanged numbers and promised to meet up with us later (they were new in town; just here for the Oktoberfest and were looking for something to do). But first, we met up with Ivan, my other buddy from Arizona, at a tavern outside his dorm, and he introduced us to a heap of other cool exchange students – from France, Sweden, the States, you name it. One guy, Spencer, is working on his BA at the University of Washington in Seattle! Cool! He's also a really neat guy; one of those people you just get a good vibe from. We had invited Nico and Ivan to come visit us in the Rheinland sometime, and it’d be great if Spencer came up, too.

So anyway, the group of us got some fries and Hefeweizen at this tavern, and then went downtown to the Augustiner Bierhalle to meet up with a whole crowd of other students. The Italians joined us, too, and I got to have my first Bayrischer Mass. But you know, Bavarian beer is actually pretty weak – no wonder they can drink it in liters! The best part, though, was just hanging out with really fun people. I forgot how much I liked Nico's and Ivan's company, and it was great to meet so many others from a whole bunch of different countries. Anna and I had a blast. At some point, we all went to go find some dancing at a club in another area of town, and danced until what must have been 4 in the morning. At this point, I was just done for, and was falling asleep on Anna's shoulder on the train on the way home. We were probably in bed by 5 am, and slept like the dead until noon the next day.

After that, greasy and hungover, but game, we set off to see what Oktoberfest was all about. And you know... it was neat, and fun to see it "in the flesh" (so to speak), but it was so extremely crowded that it was kind of off-putting. It was awesome to see tons of people actually wearing the Lederhosen and Dirndl, though – young people, too, not just traditional older folks, the way you only really see "western wear" on the older generation in Tucson. But... eh! We had more fun at the beerhall and club the night before. Adonis on the train was right: Oktoberfest is pretty commercialized. I bet it would have been a lot of fun regardless, but we were there on the very last weekend, and there was no way we were going to get a table. So we just took pictures, checked it off our mental tourbooks, and headed for the Hauptbahnhof and home.

We didn't actually get home until well after 9 pm, though, and since Anna and I always have such a good time hanging out, even exhausted as we were, we still stayed up chatting and posting pictures until well after midnight. Then we had to get up at 5.30 the next morning for her to get back to Landau and teach, and for me to make my (always forgotten!) lesson plans, and so by the time I got home from school on Monday, I was just good for nothing. I tried to do a little housework and other chores, and then just fell into bed early.

So, hey! I guess that's our weekend adventure! There are pictures on picasaweb, all organized and labeled... check 'em out! :) In the meantime, our Herbstferien (fall break) starts this upcoming Saturday and goes until the 22nd, so I'm going to start checking out things to do during that time. Anna will be at a wedding until October 15th, but maybe after that, we'll go to Italy for a couple days! You can get really cheap plane tickets on Ryan Air -- something like 20 Euros apiece, round trip. But the expensive thing will be four or five nights in a hostel, so we're going to try to keep it short. (Short -- unlike this post!) Maybe I’ll visit Matt Johnson in Cambridge before that – I should give him a call!

Okay, enough rambling. Hope Oktober is treating everyone right, out there!