Oktoberfest – My God, it’s full of beer…

The Friday before Oktoberfest started was full of pickups from airports and other busy work. Most of the guests seemed pretty cool and easy to talk to so the night kicked on pretty easily, and before I knew it, it was well past my bedtime, considering I had to be up before 6am to get on the bus to Munich.

Oktoberfest started with a snag, as our coach full of 50 excited yet still very sleepy people, broke down about 10kms out of Kirchburg. We waited around for about 30 minutes while a new coach was organized and we were soon on our way to Munich. We got there around 10am and the beer isn’t served until noon, so there was a fair amount of sitting around and waiting. The neo nazi’s (I’m not joking) were getting a little impatient on the table next to us, especially when the beer started getting served and their table was the last to get any. The day proceeded along a familiar plot line. That being; Christopher gets drunk. Christopher talks to random women (hopefully German). Christopher finds out random women are 17 and still in high school. Christopher considers his options. Christopher walks away. Okay, possibly that last one was more because we got kicked out of the Spatenbrau tent we were in and had to leave. Oh well.

So I went looking for Nicole, who was in the Lowenbrau tent, which was now blocked off so I couldn’t get in. She told me to say that I was in the Siemens Financial Services team in Box 15. It worked, after a fair amount of arguing with the door staff, and I found Nicole who told me that there is no Siemens financial services team. It was a stone cold lie. But it worked.

Nic and I had a stein and then went outside for a look around. We had both drunk all we could drink and were ready to chill out for a bit. We got to a grassed area and lay down and talked for a while. Then we play fought for a reason I don’t remember, which was when Nic knocked my phone out of my hand and it fell into pieces. The next thing I remember, she was gone, and I wouldn’t see her again until her birthday in Melbourne in May.

I walked back to the meet point where I found a girl on the verge of tears asking people if she could use their phone. She was from San Fransisco, her phone didn’t worked and she had lost her friends. My phone also didn’t work but one of the other guys from the chalet let her use his phone and we kept her company until her friend rocked up. I was very tired by this stage and slept pretty much all the way home on the bus.

The next morning I woke up quite late and was happy to see that the Oktoberfest bus had already left. About 15 people decided that two days in a row was just too much for them and were planning to go out for a walk/mountain bike ride. I was happy to have some downtime as I was feeling pretty sick in the lungs, due to my chest infection continuously following me throughout all of Europe over the past 3 months. I spent most of the day either on the internet or sitting around in the sun. That night the crew that didn’t go to Oktoberfest kicked on hard, with me working behind the bar. It was actually a lot of fun to be at the bar with people that had become my friends over the last few days. The bar was already pumping by the time the busload of Oktoberfestians returned, and once they joined the party it all went ballistic. People were drunk, dancing on tables, naked and noisy. By midnight when I went to bed due to needing to drive a 6am transfer to the airport, it was a den of noisy debauchery. My earplugs did very little to stop the noise and I had a very poor nights sleep. When I woke up at 5:30am the next morning, Shevy (my boss) and a few guests were still clinging onto the previous evening, even as Shevy’s wife Bianca set up for breakfast around them.

I did my airport transfers that day, and spent a bit of time on the net while most people watched movies as they were far too shattered to do anything else. The next day was a similar story as people were still recovering from a monster weekend, and I was still driving people to airports to be on their way home. We’re now pretty quiet, waiting for the next weekend crew to do the same thing all over again.