Germany 2: Stuttgart
Stuttgart Germany is famous for lots of things. Its the capital of the state Baden-Wurttemberg in southern Germany. Its Germany's sixth largest city. Porsche, Mercedes-Benz and Maybach are all made nearby. Its got a castle and opera houses and a rich history stretching back 1000 years. But I didn't see any of that crap. I went to Oktoberfest!!!According to wikipedia (who trusts that shit, right?) Stuttgart is Germany's second biggest Oktoberfest celebration. As you approach, you see a huge fairground full of rides, food, games and "beer tents." The beer tents are actually pretty impressive. They look more or less like this:
Each brewer tends to put up their own tent. Some of them are gigantic and hold thousands of people, some even have second floors inside. We'll get into one of those later.
Second only to beer and leiderhosen, when I think Oktoberfest I think sausage (ok thats really third). You can get all kind of wurst. Bratwurst, rindwurst, currywurst, and several other kinds of wurst that don't even translate into English.
Eine bratwurst, bitter!
And hey, if you don't want sausage, there's always the smelly fish on a stick shack
Looking around I saw lots of impressive rides. There was a two story go-cart track, this giant spinny flippy thing,
the world's largest mobile ferris wheel,
and a bunch of other rides put together by carnies that I wasn't about to get on. German or not, carnies are carnies.
We eventually gave up on that stuff, chose a beer tent, and went inside. Hrm... what to drink, what to drink. Hey look, liters of beer!
While the waitstaff is all wearing traditional garb, they were NOT all hot women. Sad. If you look carefully at the menu (click and make it big) you'll see some of the crazy German food items and also champagne. Yeah thats right, I guess some Germans like to drink in style. Also visible in the beer part is "alkoholfrei" beer ... you can guess what that means.
Soon we had our very own beers.
A liter of beer sounds like a lot, but its only about 34 liquid ounces and they disappear pretty quickly.
If you do enough of this:
Eventually you'll end up looking for the bathroom. In Germany (like many European countries) they call the bathroom the "WC." In english its for Water Closet... water is "wasser" in German, so I figure thats what they mean too. Oh, and in case you're stupid drunk and can't tell which bathroom is which, the Germans made it extremely obvious. Check out this guy.
note: thats not graffiti... thats the real sign.
Naturally as the night progresses things get hazy. Its traditional to have live music and dance on the tables to your favorite songs (if you drink enough, every song is your favorite song). The Germans were very fond of Bryan Adam's "Summer of 69" and John Denver's "Country Road."
There were a bunch of German drinking songs, some songs for toasting, some chants for toasting, etc. Careful how hard you toast though... even the liter mugs aren't invincible.
Don't worry, I didn't break mine (it was Kristine's).
We eventually made it back to the hotel we were staying at. I know this because I woke up on a mattress wrapped in sheets with no pillow. I swear the bed looked just like this when I woke up in it.
one comment:
According to the menu you can also order “Weiner Art” How did that taste?
Andy - 23 10 07 - 14:23