An unforgettable Oktoberfest

There is one way to go from Bonn to the Oktoberfest in Munich. Get up early, catch the train which you have booked like 3 weeks before and you reach Munich safely in about 6 hours.

And then there is this other way.

You book an ICE train ticket 3 weeks in advance. Get up early on the day you are supposed to travel. Have a nice long breakfast. Reach the station only to find that you have missed your train. Because somehow you thought that the train would leave at 8: 35 AM. While the actual time of departure was 8:11 AM. So you book another ticket on a different train without a seat reservation. At a cost of about €95. And leave Bonn at about 8:37 AM. Because you have no reservation, you have to keep on changing seats. Then your train stops in a tunnel for more than 15 minutes. It winds up running late by about an hour. At one scheduled stop, the train reaches the station between two trains because it gets a wrong signal. So people who had to get down at this station had to get off at the next station. Then your train never really drops you off at Munich because it was running too late and you get off some four stations before Hauptbanof, where you should have got to, and change to another train. To cut a long story short, instead of getting to the Oktoberfest by about 2:30 PM, you get there at 5.

Guess which way we chose?

Obviously, 5 o'clock on a weekend at the Oktoberfest, you can be guaranteed that there will be no space in any of the tents. But there were more surprises in store for us.

First, it was raining. It did feel bad for a while since we had just one umbrella between five people. But no, that didn’t stop us. Thanks to the rain, the seating places outside the tents were not that packed. We were drenched and it was really cold by Mumbai standards, but we found a place at a pretty popular tent preferred by tourists called Hippodrom. Sitting in the rain, we placed our order: four beers, two umbrellas. And that’s how Oktoberfest began for us. Wet, cold and full of beer!

By the time, we wound up, we had shared our umbrellas with Italians and cute Swiss boys (the verdict by the girls in our group). I had to spill some beer in my face so that a 'cute boy' from Norway would not get upset with us; later, he wanted to come home with us. No that didn’t happen. And I would also like to add that if I am creating the impression that we were all drunk then that’s not true.

On Sunday, we were at the fest again by 10 AM. This time we really wanted a place inside one of the tents. Naturally, most of them were full. After trying three tents, we finally got lucky at Hacker-Fetszelt. Its claim to fame is that the place looks just like ‘Bavarian heaven’. And this time it was just the Hacker-Pschorr beer and pommes frites (French fries). Surrounded by Italiansm who had come all dressed in traditional Bavarian costume, we shared our table with another set of Italians and not that I remember it quite well but quite a few locals too.

Other than the beer the exciting thing about Oktoberfest is just the way that this huge crowd has fun together. The applause when anybody gets on to the table and gulps down one liter of beer in a matter of seconds is a sight. So are the boos when the person fails in this daring act. I have never had so much fun sharing a table. Language is not a problem. The idea of raising a toast ('Prost!' in German) at just about everything, dancing on the table when the band starts playing is just so much fun. By the time, I dragged myself out of the tent; I had a really long list of goodbyes to say. Tobias, DJ, guy who didn’t know any English…a few others. And then it was back to Bonn.

No, we didn’t miss the train back.

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.