original little hellraisers

so, i know what you’re thinking.  john, the guy who loves beer will be in munich.  you know, germany.  you know, the place where beer follows what is called the purity law.  and, well, he can’t possibly be there for oktoberfest — the celebration of beer.  not a chance.

well, munich has a lot more going for it than just the once-a-year-sing-a-song-drink-beer-by-the-liter festival.  it could be one of the most classically european cities i have ever been to.  it’s plain beautiful and seems to have survived the war much more intact than berlin.

i will go in chronological order though so you can appreciate what five liters of beer will do to someone.

we stayed in the hotel that could be booked on short notice.  surprise, surprise, the city fills up during the once-a-year-sing-a-song-drink-beer-by-the-liter festival.  so, here we are on the outskirts of the city, in a nice hotel, but definitely far from the life of munich.

erm, i’m getting ahead of myself.  my boss, gregoire (above), likes to smoke cigarettes after 6 p.m.  we stopped short of entering the hotel so that greg could partake of his ritual.  while he is smoking his cancer-stick a huge bus drives up to the hotel.  the kind of bus that, oh, i don’t know, a professional soccer (football) team might travel in if they were playing in munich that following day.  i just wouldn’t expect the team from munich to travel to the outskirts of munich to stay in a hotel in munich.  but there they were, fc bayern munich.  all of them.  they travel with little rolling suitcases with their number on it.  it was… cute.

and we’re talking: klinsmen, schweinsteigger, klose and my personal favorite of the team (and one of my favorite players on the french team) ribery.  he’s the one in the picture and yes, he’s the meanest looking em-effer i have ever seen.  not a tall or super imposing guy, but he does seem like he could kill you if he wanted.

and then there is schweinsteigger — the girls all swooned over him.  he’s tall, fit and well, pretty damn good looking.  it didn’t matter if the girls were 8 or 80, they were in love with schweinsteigger, which evidently also means pig-lifter.

we awoke the following day to do a quick bit of shopping for dirndls for the ladies (kate - left, lulu - right) we were traveling with — it’s a totally cute concept — people get dressed up to get completely obliterated.

at about 1:30 we swung over to the once-a-year-sing-a-song-drink-beer-by-the-liter festival.  upon arriving at about 2pm, there are wasted people everywhere. passed out on the grass, park benches, etc.  now quick! what is the first thing you would want to do after drinking a bunch of beer?  well, get on a roller coaster of course.  or tea cups.  or a variety of other rapidly spinning amusement park rides.  right?  right!?

the once-a-year-sing-a-song-drink-beer-by-the-liter festivall is arranged by brewing tents — and the tents must have breweries in munich and must follow the strict brewing laws of the land.  you basically need to reserve tables in advance and for one of two (or both) shifts at the table.  if you don’t, you have to wait outside until space opens up and then you get let in.

now, my boss’ boss, christoph (pictured above with lulu), being from munich, called some people who know people and got us a table at the last minute prior to our arrival.  and you’ve never felt like royalty until you walk past an entire line of sober people wanting to be drunk to have your boss pull out his cell phone, do the ‘beep-boop-beep-boop’ dial and speak a language you don’t know to have the doors open majestically and get waved forward by a lass in a dirndl — it was like valhalla — the valkyrie of beer opened the door, let us in and then shut it behind us.  you could feel the burning stares of the sober, wanting to be drunk people in the back of your head.  this, we found out was the augustiner tent — one that evidently (according to wikipedia) taps beer from wooden kegs — yay!

it was then, and only then, that they serve you beer by the liter.  the l-i-t-e-r.  it’s pretty incredible.  marc, you would have loved it.  i sure did.

at 1.5 liters of beer the band started singing, and i’m not joking, ‘country roads’ by john denver.  and there is nothing quite like a bunch of drunk germans singing an american folk song to really throw you off.  and then, and these tents are huge, the crowd of six-thousand or so people climb up on their benches, with their massive 1 liter steins and start swinging their arms in unison to the songs.  it’s absolutely hilarious.

photos — mostly safe for work — can be found here on lulu’s flickr site.  just remember, i’m the good looking one.

now, here’s the thing i am absolutely amazed by: i didn’t see one fight, not one huge 1 liter stein broken over someone’s head. not one unwelcome grope.  the only thing out of place was how civil everyone was.  all the americans agreed — in the u.s. there would have been a stabbing or something.  we didn’t see anything of the sort.  and i’m not trying to be a self-deprecating traveling american.  we were all super impressed with how awesome of an experience it was — not sullied by violence, harsh words or anything of the like.

to my children: this will be your high school graduation present.  i am going to send you both to munich to partake of oktoberfest.  don’t be an a-hole is all i ask. it is so awesome and so fun.  you can hold me to it — we’ll get you a table reserved and send you out there to enjoy the once-a-year-sing-a-song-drink-beer-by-the-liter festival.  i hope to go back myself at some point.  i came up with the idea of it being your graduation presents after, quite drunk, i started talking about my awesome wife and kids to the german police officers that were seated next to us.  yeah, i’m that guy.

safe to say that after 5 liters of beer and 10 hours of sustained drinking, i was less than sober.  we somehow made it back to the hotel, in tact, and lived to see it another year.

now you might think that all to do in munich is to drink beer by the liter. wrong.  christoph met us the following morning (i was somewhat hung over but not totally destroyed) at spaten haus for some sausage, mustard, pretzels and, erm, more beer (that i couldn’t quite look at).  christoph got to bring his dog into the place, which, again, never would have happened in the states where she (sissy, the dog’s name) could hang out under the table and wait for fallen scraps.

after brunch christoph took us on a walk through munich where he exposed us all to munich’s surfing culture.  yes, the city is land-locked, but they have a small, but passionate, surfing community.  promise to watch the video below, give it about 2 minutes and you’ll see.  there’s this giant, quick-flowing river where a rock or some such obstructs the water and creates a perma-wave.  and these guys are nuts.  you fall too close to the edge and, quite literally, you could die hitting your head on the side of the ’shore.’

we then walked through the enormous english garden in munich where flocks of adorable little kids ran around in their stylish jackets (did i mention that everyone in europe is totally well dressed and presentable?)

the garden is absolutely huge.  in the center of it? you guessed it, a giant beer garden.  we ended our trip in munich, slightly hung over, paddling through the lake in the center of the park in a four-person paddle boat.

and while you could focus on this city for being the home of a particular german leader who decided to practice genocide under a set of misguided tenets, you could also look upon it for what it is — a wonderfully historic, amazingly beautiful part of the bavarian world that celebrates what owen would call daddy juice.

from here… the czech republic and then paris.