Sunday, September 18, 2011

The Oktoberfest 9-17-11


At the parade
Entering the wiesen
At the wiesen by the brewery horses
Magdalena and Johanna with the horses
Johanna with brewery wagon
brewery horseman
brewery horses
brewery horse  and finery
Statute Bavaria
dirndl wearer

first beer at the Wiesen
Pretzel vender
pretzel eater
another pretzel eater
maidens wearing their dirndls

Susanne and Christoph
Magdalena and Mac
The gang
Diana and Susanne showing their dirndls
At the Augustiner biergarten off the Oktoberfest venue
Puke meadows at the wiesen.  Where people that ate too drunk can come and sleep it off.
More beer
Tourists with maidkins
Dirndl maidkins
More beer and a 2 half chickens
Enjoying a beer
Tourists enjoying biergarten
Magdalena and Heini
End of the evening catching the ubahn
In the early AM it was raining but by the time for the parade it was sunny  and muggy.  The parade starts off the Oktoberfest with the brewerys showing off their traditional beer wagons pulled by richly decorated draft horses.  The brewerys involved are the ones that have beer tents at the oktoberfest venue or wiesen. In between each brewery there are marching bands dressed in traditional outfits.  I videoed the parade but can't upload that much so if you want to see a good bit of the parade go to utube and search 2011 Oktoberfest parade.  Somebody had already uploaded it by Sunday morning. 
The oktoberfest is the worlds largest beer fest.  The 16 day event has 6,000,000 visitors and they consume 1.5 million gallons of beer.  It was started in 1810 to celebrate the  Oct 12th marriage of Ludwig I to Saxon-hildburghausen princess Therse.  It was moved to Sept. later to have better weather.  This year they broke the 9 euro cost for a litre of beer.  It's expensive but everybody seems to have a good time.
After the parade we walked toward the wiesen and heard the cannons go off opening the fest.  The Mayor of Munich taps the first keg and they shoot a cannon and people start running to the beer tents to get a seat.  I wouldn't doubt that there was 500,000 people visit the place today. 
We walked thru the wiesen to a "traditional beer tent" which is supposedly more sedate then the 11 other tents.  More family oriented but it looked like they took their drinking just as seriously as everywhere else.  There were 4 of us to start, but later 3 more showed up.  We stayed there till about 4 and then went to an off site beergarden called Augustiner, met Heini and proceded to drink more beer and eat more chickens.  At dark we headed to Christoph and Susanne house for a little wine to top off the evening.  After that we got on the ubahn and headed home about midnite.






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