Oktoberfest 2006 - Part II

By request, I am publishing my Road Updates from Oktoberfest 2006 on my blog.  If you missed Part I yesterday, it would be a good idea to scroll down and read that first.  It's short.  This one's long.

Enjoy!

Oktoberfest 2006

Despite the lack of a truly great anecdote to kick things off, like for instance the “ice fog” episode of last year or even the “I am very horny” bit from last week, here we go with my promised update on the World Famous Oktoberfest.  Stick with me here, you might even learn something!

Of course, when I long ago planned this month-long odyssey around dueling Deutscher trade shows, I was not at all planning to be in Munich at Oktoberfest.  You see, I made the classic dumb American error of assuming (and we all know what that means) that something called Oktoberfest just might take place in, oh, say, October.

Nuh-uh.

By tradition, by which I mean for the last 173 years, Oktoberfest is a 16-day party that ends on the first Sunday in October.  But when the first Sunday is the first or second of October (this year it’s on the first) the festival is extended until the 3^rd, so that it includes German Unity Day.  Got that?  That makes this year’s Oktoberfest 18 days long, instead of the normal 16.  Think we’ll have enough beer?

Part One - Laying the groundwork

Oktoberfest 2006 actually began for me last Friday night, the night before its official opening, with football fans and Muslims jointly sponsoring an all-nighter behind my apartment, which was duly reported in my last update.  The following day, Saturday, I was resolved to go nowhere near the Theresienwiese, or d’Wiesn for short, the huge fairground where this annual bacchanal is held.  I watched the CNN highlights later, and saw the mayor of Munich, clad in full traditional Bavarian garb, pound the tap into the first keg, exclaiming “O’zapht ist!”, which means, not surprisingly, “It’s tapped!” in very very old Old Bavarian.  Zapht also sounds like what you’d be if you had a few from that famous keg.

Speaking of which, let’s get one thing out of the way right now.  This is all about beer.  Sure, Sunday’s at d’Wiesn are family days, and there are enormous roller coasters and Ferris wheels and various dangerous-looking, vomit-inducing whirling contraptions everywhere, but you can get that lots of places.  The heart and soul of the party is drinking beer, eating lots of food, listening to various music, drinking more beer, banging your giant glass mugs together repeatedly while shouting incoherent toasts, drinking more beer, and drinking a lot more beer.  This cannot be overstated.  But let me try anyway – I have never, ever seen so many people so drunk.  And don’t forget, I went to college!

Fortunately for me, rather than having to stumble around blindly, I had been invited by one of our vendors, Logitech, headquartered conveniently in Munich, to accompany them to their reserved area in one of the “tents.”  Carsten, our representative, in a meeting at IFA in Berlin, had invited me thusly:  “Hey Frank, meet me next Wednesday at d’Wiesn and we will drink beer together.”  Did I mention that the Germans tend to be very direct?

Not content to just show up, I decided to do some homework.  First, I looked on that Internet thing, where I discovered most of the cool facts I’m sharing with you.  Second, I spent an hour and a half on Sunday afternoon on a Secret Reconnaissance Mission to the Theresienwiese.  And third, I conducted numerous scientific experiments involving beer.  Actually, that third part has been ongoing for at least two weeks now.

On Sunday, before heading out to the festival grounds, I walked around to the local grocer for some supplies, stopped for a coffee at a local café, and took the long way back to the apartment so I could check the relative damage incurred on the neighborhood by the first day of Oktoberfest.  I had been kept awake very late by fellow apartment-dwellers doing what seemed to be regular Saturday night reveling more than anything else.

My first impression was not a good one, as it involved blood.  Walking out of the apartment building, there was blood on the stone pathway.  A lot of it.  When I came up to the café, there were unmistakable blood splatters on the sidewalk and the wall, which had definitely not been there Saturday morning.  I also noticed a fair amount of broken glass about, very unusual in generally spotless Munich, and when I went down the escalator later in the afternoon to get the U-Bahn into town, there was blood on both the escalator steps and the train platform.

Ruh-roh.

I am very happy to report that this was completely confined to opening day, and I haven’t given it a single thought since, until now of course.  In fact, everyone seems to be having such a great time that there is no sense of tension or threat anywhere.  Sure, there are plenty of crazed Australians (Crikey!) and Italians (#$%&!) wandering around shouting incoherently, but they all seem fairly harmless.

My stroll around the festival was rather uneventful, but I got an idea of the lay of the land, and also a good sense of how massively huge a deal Oktoberfest is.  First, it was so crowded everywhere that one could literally barely move.  Second, there were absolutely no seats to be had, and a seat is a requirement to be served a beer.  Aside from a huge amusement park, the majority of the fairgrounds are taken up by the beer “tents”, which are actually semi-permanent structures that ring the grounds.  There are fourteen main tents, seating from 2,500 people up on the inside, with additional seating outside surrounding each tent..  The largest tent seats 8,450 souls inside, and another 2,450 outside.  These boys are big.  All are operated and staffed by one of the six authorized official Munich Oktoberfest breweries:  Spaten, Augustiner, Paulaner, Hacker-Pschorr, Hofbrau, and Lowenbrau.  Over six million visitors will pass through these and the 18 smaller tents in the course of the 18 days, and will consume just under 450 billion liters of beer.  OK, I made that last number up, but in actual fact over 30% of all the beer produced in Munich in 2006 will be consumed on these grounds in just 18 days. 

I have pictures.

Surprising, at least to me, is how many of the folks at Oktoberfest are true locals, and by that I mean Bavarians, not just Germans.  As a matter of fact, Oktoberfest is not that popular a tourist destination for Germans outside of Bavaria.  If you thought that this was a Disneyland-ish, sterile, tourist-pandering anachronism, like I guess I sort of did, you’d be way wrong.  Fully 72% of those six million visitors are local Bavarians, with 15% coming from all other countries combined, and just 13% from elsewhere in Germany.

Part Two – The Beer Necessities

After two weeks in Munich, I’ve probably knowingly or unknowingly sampled at least the most popular beer, the “Helles”, from all of the aforementioned breweries.  I say unknowingly since no one other than tourists really pays much attention to the brand of draft beer they’re served, and what it says on the glass is not a sure indicator for what’s in it.  Of course, if you are having one at the Spatenhaus you can be sure it’s a Spaten, etc.  Most of the locals, when given a choice, will drink Augustiner, which is the most local of beers, as well as the oldest brewery in Munich.  I remember when I first came here a few years ago and I was having dinner with my colleague Thorsten, he told me Augustiner was Munich’s own beer, and that it was the only one of the big six brews that was not exported.  “Oh,” I said, “So that means it’s not available outside of Germany.”

“No,” he said, “That means it’s not available outside of Munich.”

And a word about “Helles.”  “Hell” in German means “light”, and “dunkel” means dark.  So “Helles” beer is light beer, lager actually, rather than the other “light” beer, Pils.  Pils is what all of the tourists drink, and in fact what most Germans drink, even in Bavaria.  Not so in Munich.  At the same dinner with Thorsten, I ordered an Augustiner Pils when we sat down, and Thorsten raised a huge eyebrow.

“Frank, you are ordering a Pils?”

“Uh, yes, I think so…why?”

“In Munich, only the women drink Pils.  The men drink Helles.”

Been drinking Helles ever since.  Love to watch the manly American men stride up to the bar and order a lady-bier.  Me, I’m sharing a smile with the Deutscher’s over my Helles.

Thanks, Thorsten!

So far, my favorite draft beer in town is the Lowenbrau Helles that it served at Bar Anna, a place you may remember from previous updates.  It tastes cool and clean, which probably has as much to do with a cool cellar and clean pipes as anything else.  Close second is the Augustiner Helles from any number of places, which seems a tiny bit more carbonated than the Lowenbrau, but who knows?

So how strong is German beer, and Oktoberfest beer in particular?  Funny you should ask, as one of the things I wanted to be fairly sure of before going to the fest with my Logitech buddies was that I would not have two beers and fall over, or worse.  I was not particularly worried about this, since it would not exactly be my first beer, nor my first German beer, but one does wonder.  The myth that Oktoberfest beer is literally twice as strong as the regular stuff is just that, a myth.  Likewise the belief that regular German beer is super-strong.  In fact, sticking with Augustiner for reasons that should by now be obvious, the regular bottled Helles clocks in at exactly 5.5% alcohol.  This is the ubiquitous bottled beer of Munich – from beautiful people at sidewalk café’s to drunks in the gutters, if it’s coming out of a bottle it’s almost always Augustiner Hell.  Compare that to US Budweiser at 4.8%, and it doesn’t look like a huge difference.  In fact, Augustiner is just a wee bit stronger than Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, which registers 5.3% alcohol.  Bottled Lowenbrau Export, a kind of Pils/Helles/Dunkles bastard child, is at 5.1%.

So how about the Oktoberfest brews?  First off, let’s get another thing straight.  This is not the quasi-dark beer that Lowenbrau and Becks pass off as Oktobefest for six weeks each year in the USA.  You know, the kind of funky-tasting, semi-flat stuff.  I never buy it.  Gives me a headache.  Oktoberfest beer here is just regular Helles, very slightly darker (but still light) and little more powerful.  How little is a little?  Bottled Augustiner Oktoberfestbier clocks in at 6% even.  What’s the big deal, you say?  Well, that’s what I thought too at first.  Then the math starts kicking in.  Sure, it’s only a half a percent more than the regular, but that’s a cool 10% more alcohol.  And compare it to Bud and it’s all of a sudden 27% stronger!  As a matter of fact, the most powerful stuff available in the USA, which a lot of people want banned from the inner cities, is Old English 800 Malt Liquor, at a massive 6.13% alcohol, or nearly a third stronger than Bud.  Not that I would ever compare Old English to The World’s Best Beer, but there is one other thing they have in common.  No one is drinking 12-ounce cans of the stuff.  Just as the most popular size for killer Malt Liquor is the quart bottle, pretty much all that is served at d’Wiesn is the “Mass”, or 1-liter mug.  For those of you not metrically inclined, a liter is 33.814 fluid ounces, or just about two ounces more than a quart.

So do the math.  Want to go to Oktoberfest and have “a couple beers?”  That’s 67.6 ounces of beer, equivalent to 5.6 cans of Bud, volume wise.  Alcohol wise?  You’d have to swill almost eight cans of Bud to match those two beers.

And the thing is, almost nobody goes to the World Famous Oktoberfest where they are pouring The World’s Best Beer to have “a couple beers.”

See where we’re heading here?

Part Three – About Time, Eh?

The great thing about word processing is that unlike the old typewriter – and don’t give me that wide-eyed “typewriter?” look, I know how old most of you are – one can just go on and on.  No paper to change, etc.  Especially if you’re, oh, say sitting in a 210 square foot apartment where the CNN news is on its 17^th time around on a nine-inch TV.

So on Thursday night I set out towards d’Wiesn to meet my Oktoberfest destiny, on foot of course.  Thanks to Sunday’s Secret Recon Mission it only took me about ten minutes to get over to the sneaky little back entrance that is closest to my apartment.  I did what I guessed to be a very smart thing at that point.  I was purposefully about ten minutes early, so I stopped at a nice-looking Wurst joint and picked up a Brat.  No telling what the agenda was going to be once I met the guys, and the last thing I wanted was to start drilling Mass’s of Festbier on an empty stomach.  As it turned out, I needn’t have worried.

A few things about Oktoberfest, and these not from the Internet but rather from my own observations.  First, the tents are unspeakably huge.  Sure, I’ve given you the cold stats, but just stop to think about six, seven thousand or more folks seated at rows of booths, packed in shoulder to shoulder, eating, smoking tens of thousands of cigarettes, and toasting each other constantly with these 10-pound mugs of brew.  It’s hypnotizing.  Add a big brass/electric band in the center on a 25-foot high square stage playing everything from traditional Bavarian oom-pah music to mid-seventies hair-band classics and you’ve got a head-shaker.  So after poking my head into three or four, I felt I had gotten the picture. 

I was to meet the guys at Ammer Zelt, which is one of the eighteen “small tents” dotted between and among the giants.  This one was a baby, holding only about 1,500 or so, located right next to the colossal Augustiner main tent, and obviously an affiliated property, shall we say.  When I mentioned Logitech to the host, he smiled broadly and led me with a flourish to four or five booths in the center of the hall, where I immediately recognized Carsten and his troops, who had clearly started without me, even though I was neither thirty seconds early nor late.  Remember, we’re in Germany here.  If you want to get off on the wrong foot with these folks, just show up a few seconds late.  And early is every bit as bad.  I sat down at Carsten’s booth, which could comfortable seat four, with five other people.  The table was completely covered with a huge appetizer tray which was balanced on four empty Mass mugs.  Offerings included lots of huge Bavarian semi-soft pretzels, various cold smoked sausages, and ice cream scoop-sized dollops of different spreads, which I found to include garlicky butter-ish stuff, different cheesy stuffs, and some really delicious smoked fishy stuff.  Everyone was slathering one or more of these spreads on everything available, pretzels and sausages alike.  It was absolutely delicious.  A Mass of Augustiner magically appeared, and the fact that I greeted the table in German was roundly applauded and then repeatedly toasted. 

For several hours, actually.

I was told later that you can get wine as well as soft drinks or water, and even a half-liter (“eines halbes Helles”) of beer, “for the ladies” as Carsten said with a wink, but I didn’t see any of them.  What I saw was hundreds upon hundreds of Mass’ going in one direction and hundred and hundreds of empties going in the other, towards the dishwasher, which ran full time.  None of this is particularly cheap either, by the way, and there is an annual controversy when the official price of a Mass is announced.  Not surprisingly, it goes up nearly every year, and there is public outrage and literally front-page news over every ten Euro-cents increase.  There was much discussion as to whether the universe could even continue to exist when this years’ all-time high price of EU7.50 (US$9.60) was announced, a whopping 40 Euro-cents increase over last year’s maximum.  It’s enough to make you go out and get sauced. (In 2011, the announced price of a liter of beer broke the nine euro barrier for the first time, at EU9.20, or US$12.55! –Ed.)

Confident that one thing I would definitely not be doing was drinking on an empty stomach, I started to relax, forget about the math, and have some fun.  Carsten was fascinated with the idea that an American would willfully subject himself to a week of German Immersion Therapy, and our tablemates were equally perplexed, and said so.  Directly.  Naturally, they only wanted to speak German to see exactly what I had learned, and I was all too happy to bungle along, particularly as Carsten was totally my advocate, repeatedly telling them to slow down, stop using beery colloquialisms, and repeat themselves.  He was so great about it, I could’ve kissed him.

But I am not warm.

I noticed that Carsten’s first beer had been much lighter than mine as he ordered a “Normal” from our waitress for his second, and asked him if he had been drinking something different.  He told me that since he had walked from the train to d’Wiesn and was thirsty he had started off with a half-and-half, beer and lemonade.  Yuck.  In England, they call this stuff Shandy, and drink it on hot days.  In Germany, they call it beer and lemonade.  Did I mention that Germans are fairly direct?

Since by this time I had completely forgotten about equivalent numbers of Budweiser’s, alcohol percentages, and the fact that I had to go to work the next day, I was rapidly nearing the bottom of my second Mass of Helles.  I was also getting wrecked.  Not wanting to make much more of a fool out of myself than I already had, I prepared to offer my sincere thanks to all and take my leave.  So I stood up.

“Toilet?” said Carsten, directly.

“No, actually, I’m going to say thank you and good night.” I said in my best beery German.

Carsten looked at me with a mix of sadness and horror.

“But we haven’t even eaten yet!” he laughed.  “Sit down!  We have ordered dinner already.”

OK.  At this point, I had consumed about two pounds of sausages, a whole two-foot-wide pretzel, lots of goopy dip stuff, and oh yeah, two liters of The World’s Best Beer.  Not to mention the "safety" Bratwurst.  So naturally, I sat down and had dinner.  We ate the traditional dinner of d’Wiesn: potato dumplings, beet-reddened kraut, and a Hendl each.  “Hendl” is another Old Bavarian word meaning hen or chicken, and they go through thousands and thousands a day.  You can see (and smell) them cooking from early morning until late night on long rotisseries over charcoal fires that never die for 18 days.  Delicious stuff all, especially the Hendl, which was crispy on the outside and moist and tender inside, an interesting species of local chicken with no real white meat, just slightly less dark at the breast.  Oh, and here comes another Mass of Festbier to wash it all down.  How appropriate!

After the plates were cleared and dinner was duly toasted, we settled in for some more music and chat.  My German began to desert me completely, and Carsten switched mercifully to about 80% English.  The band, situated about thirty feet above one end of our tent, came back after a break and began playing more loudly.  I suddenly realized that they were no longer playing traditional Bavarian folk and drinking tunes.  The dead giveaway was when they broke into “Smooth Operator.”  So of course I deadpanned Carsten and said “Hey Carsten, is this a traditional Bavarian song?”  To which he responded, equally deadpan, “Hell, no, Frank, that's Smooth Operator!”

Shortly after, I gave up.  The forty-ish lead singer was belting out “These Boots were Made for Walkin’” in her Dirndl, and I was having a hard time understanding even the basics of the conversations raging at our tables.  Their English was fast approaching the deconstructed state of my German, and it was time to go.  Following six or eight heartfelt toasts, naturally.  I honestly can’t tell you whether or not that third Mass was my last.  I strongly suspect it wasn’t.  You do the math, it gives me a headache to think about it.

**********

If you’ve made it this far, I owe you an apology for the length of this missive.  I’m actually editing it down here Sunday night as I listen to the Eagles game live on the computer.  It was a lot longer just an hour ago!  Tomorrow I’m in the Munich office for one more day, then off to Amsterdam Tuesday and Cologne Wednesday for PhotoKina.

Who knows what adventures await?

Best wishes to all,

Frank

Thanks for reading!
FS
September 20, 2011

Oktoberfest 2006

Let me explain these next two posts.  From 2004-2006 I traveled extensively in Europe while working for Amazon.com. London and Munich were my most frequent destinations, and I spent cumulatively months in Munich, my unquestioned favorite.  During my trips, I penned Road Updates, silly little missives that I sent to an email list of friends. During one epic month-long trip to Berlin, Amsterdam, Cologne, and Munich, I ended the trip with two weeks in Munich, the second of which overlapped Oktoberfest.

By popular demand, I am re-posting these Updates in their original, untouched form, errors and all, on my new blog.  Your comments, as always, are welcome.  Here's Part One.

September, 2006

Howdy, all:

Sorry about the somewhat impersonal group mail, but I wanted to give you a quick update from Munich.  Also sorry if a lot of this is a repeat for some of you.

The less said about the IFA trade show in Berlin the better.  It was crowded, hot, and too long, but it was actually quite productive from a boring business perspective.

My dear Laura made the absurdly long trek from Seattle through Amsterdam to Munich to visit me for a long weekend following IFA, and it was wonderful.  The weather forecast had been for rain all weekend right up until Laura left Seattle, but miraculously the storms blew through the night before her arrival and left us with three days of unseasonably sunny, breezy, warm weather.  We saw some sights, ate some great food, and even celebrated our 27th (!) wedding anniversary Saturday night at my favorite Provencal restaurant here.  Overall, a great weekend.

Since her departure, I have been living a monk-like existence in a tiny student apartment (more on it below), going to school all day and roaming Munich at night, really getting a feel for the different areas of the city.

My week of immersion German classes ended yesterday, and I promptly went out to celebrate.  I was planning to splurge on one of the top-rated restaurants downtown, but as I walked about and perused the menus I realized I was in more of a swill-beer-and-party frame of mind than a fine-wine-and-dine mood.  Wound up much later at the ultra-tony Bar Anna, a huge trendy hotel bar, so exclusive that there were reserved seats at the bar!  There was also a small but chic restaurant area, and to my surprise and delight it turned out to be very good Japanese.  Cha-ching!  Beer and sushi!

The classes were beyond hard.  I had six 45-minute classes per day, for billing purposes, but what it boiled down to was two hour-and-a-half sessions in the morning separated by a break, a long lunch, and then another hour-and-a-half session with a second teacher in the afternoon.  The two teachers conspired to arrange the punishment thusly: Claudia, a fifty-something classic German battleaxe, would beat me senseless with German grammar and structure for nearly three hours, then after lunch Sabine would conduct a daily "conversation session" around a topic or two in the afternoon.  You get the picture: It was the classic good teacher, bad teacher set up.  Did I mention that Sabine was also a leggy thirty-something blond with an easy laugh and an infectious smile?  No, I didn't think so.

I have a few good stories from the classes, for sure, but here I will share my favorite.  I was in my standard tongue-tied condition during Wednesday's afternoon “conversation” session, trying to explain the horrible service I had experienced along with the great food at the world famous Rathskeller in Marienplatz downtown the previous evening.  I had been walking for a while and was hot and thirsty, and no one in the restaurant would wait on me.  I was explaining this as best I could to Sabine, saying (in German) "Of course, I was very hot."  At this point, although in three days I had not heard her speak a single word of English other than to define words, she literally leapt from her seat and said, in perfect English, "Frank, listen carefully, because I'm going to save you a hell of a lot of embarrassment right now."  I was speechless.  Of course, it turns out that the literal "I was hot", or "Ich war Heiss" in local Deutsch slang, means "I was horny."  So as it happened, I had looked straight at the old waitress at the Rathskeller and pronounced, "I am very horny tonight!"

Mama mia.

I also learned that "I am warm" in literal German, means "I am gay."  I have successfully blocked out all recollection of whether I used this phrase before I learned all of this, but no one followed me home at least.

My apartment is very small, with a tiny combo stove, fridge, and sink, a small cupboard and wardrobe, and a single bed.  I do have a small balcony, and most important a bathroom with a real shower.  The drain doesn't work particularly well, however, limiting showers to seven minutes before it overflows. I was luxuriating in the shower for nine minutes this morning, Saturday, and flooded the whole damn place.

Aye carumba!

Oktoberfest started today as well, and I found out, totally unexpectedly, that my apartment, which is in a horrible lower class student and Turkish immigrant neighborhood, is less than 1.5 K from the Oktoberfest site.  Last night, before it had even started, there were British and German guys in the park behind my place at 4:00 am belting out competing football songs at the top of their lungs.  When the largely Muslim denizens of the floors below mine countered with group shouts of "Allah Akbar" (God is great) the police finally came and shut the whole mess down.

Today, it seems that the entire population of Bavaria has lost its collective mind and is parading around the town (starting at about 8:00am I might add) drinking beer and singing, virtually all dressed in Dirndl's and Lederhosen.  I shit you not.

Humpin' himiny.

Another Munich Update will follow, including an actual first-hand Oktoberfest report.  Ah, the things I do to make these updates interesting.

More soon.

Frank
(At the halfway point of my month-long odyssey.)

Technical note:  for those concerned about my thumbs, not to mention my mental stability, no, I did not type this missive upon my Crackberry.  I sent it from a deep-cover address in an Internet cafe to my Blackberry, from whence it has been forwarded. -F