Austrian Road Trip: Accidental Oktoberfest

Nobody believes me when I say that I went to Oktoberfest last year by accident. I promise you it’s possible. It starts by planning a road trip through the mountains of Austria, when a round-trip flight to Munich, Germany proved to be cheaper than any alternatives. We figured that it would be fun to tack a German city onto our Austrian itinerary, and it was only a couple of hours from the mountains. It wasn’t until the flights were booked and the trip mapped out that we started looking into Munich hotels…

“Um, why is everything $500 a night?”

It should have been obvious. We are beer drinkers. We own calendars. But alas, we unintentionally had a flight booked that landed in Munich just in time for the last 3 days of Oktoberfest (i.e. the busiest weekend of the year). By some Hotels.com miracle, we got a room for less than $500 a night that was a 15-20 min walk from the fairgrounds. What started as a plan to lackadaisically spend 3 days exploring the historic neighborhoods of Munich was about to become a beer-chugging, glass-clinking 3 day sing-a-long. We were committed now. The dirndls arrived a few days before our flight (real ones, sans offensive Halloween costume kitsch).

We arrived in Munich early on a Saturday morning, so the plan was to hit Oktoberfest on Sunday after we’d recovered from jetlag. The city was busy with extra visitors. Downtown was a bustle of pedestrians surrounded by old historic buildings adorned with pointed arches. We ventured into a store called “My Shoes” to buy some skinny sneakers on the fly after deciding that the “cute booties” with a heel in my suitcase would not be ideal for a day of boozing walking. For lunch we ended up at Vilkualienmarket which was full of food stands, standing in the longest line we saw because we figured that it meant it had the best food. The menu was in German so we watched the people ahead of us to see what the most popular choice was, and then ordered by pointing. We ended up with two fresh cut slabs of pork sliced to order from a massive cut of meat that was visible through a glass window and placed on fresh rolls. 7 Euros for two. The pork was tender like butter with a salty skin. I’ve never had a piece like it. A real Munich “hamburger”.  

I hadn’t had much to drink over the past few weeks, so that night we knew we needed to “warm up” for the festival the next day to avoid dropping like flies before noon. Fraunhofer Wirtshaus was a relaxed, local-feeling restaurant with tall glasses of draft beer and plates full of tender meats, bread dumplings, and tangy red cabbage. Bread dumplings are large chewy balls of gluten that glisten with seared oil and are meant to be ripped apart with a fork and dipped in a bath of gravy. Dumpling-rific.

Oktoberfest centers around 14 large beer tents (capacity of up to 6,000) that encircle festival grounds resembling a massive carnival, with rides, games, food stands, and a surprising number of families. Inside the tents are hundreds of picnic tables, so everybody sits with strangers unless you were one of the lucky ones who reserved a year ahead. In the center of the room is usually a large band with instruments. Picking a tent for Oktoberfest had been filling me with anxiety for days. I read all the blogs. I scrubbed through peoples’ experiences. Some people said that going on a weekend at all would be a disaster and that we’d never get a seat. Others said that they tent-hopped all day long without a single worry. Apparently, you can only be served a beer if you have a seat (think, not like a bar). We narrowed down our top choices to Hacker, Hofbrau (touristy, but kind of a staple), Augustiner, and Lowenbrau and decided to take our chances that Sunday on whichever tent “called” to us. Hacker-Festzelt was the winner – we followed the dirndls right in, and after wandering around looking lost for several minutes, managed to get a waitress who was carrying 8 liters of beer in her skinny arms to help us find a seat. We were plopped down at a table of 4 near the band and asked very matter-of-fact, “how many beers?”. FYI, there is one kind of beer per tent, you pay in cash by the round, and it is only served by the liter. A full liter, which, unlike the waitress, required both of my hands to successfully lift.

We ended up at the best table ever. After about a liter and a half, it was like we’d all been friends for years. The whole table lived in Munich, but most of them were from different parts of the world. Every 30 minutes or so the entire tent, thousands of people, would start chanting a German beer cheer and everybody clanks their glasses. Sometimes, you do this while standing on the benches (standing on benches is encouraged, but standing on tables gets you kicked out). Our table mates taught us how to eat German white sausage properly, by slicing and removing (not eating) the casing. They also taught us that pouring beer into another person’s cup is bad luck and will gain you looks of horror. The highlight of our table time was purchasing a small jar full of white powder from the waitress. It looks like an illegal substance, but it’s actually powdered menthol. It’s very common to see people snorting a bit into their nostrils to clear their sinuses and stay alert during the boozing. It felt about as shady as it sounds, but when in Rome.

The joyful energy was unmatched. It was more than I could have expected. By the end of the night, we’d visited a second beer tent, ridden 3 amusement park rides without tossing our cookies, and eaten far too little food. The whole place vibrated. I get it now. I’m converted. And quite schnitzeled.  

The next morning, I realized I’d made a huge mistake. I didn’t order chicken in the beer tent. They were serving it by the half-bird, a specialty that effectively soaks up booze. Short on beer money, I prioritized my liters and skipped that step. In my post-inebriated state, Katie dragged me on a walk around Englischer Garten to watch people surfing on a small river that ran between the trees, and eventually, to get that half chicken I’d missed the day before. It hit differently today.

That night we finally made it to the famous Hofbrauhaus (the actual building, not the tent). How people manage to visit the tents for several days in a row is a mystery to me. We settled onto an old wooden table next to two men named Mick and Richard from Australia, who chatted with us about our weekend escapades over plates of sausage with tangy sauerkraut. I slowly recovered as German music swirled through the air. I finished my last stein of beer and readied my mind for the mountains.