48 Hours at Oktoberfest: Day Two

On our second day at Oktoberfest we made an early start and got to the festival at around 9.30am (which wasn’t easy after the previous day’s many litres of beer…) That may seem early, but you really need to get a prompt start in the tents if you want to have any hope of finrnng a seat.

We headed to the pastry tent for breakfast and were surprised to find it full already. The pastry tent is shaped like a gingerbread castle and looks a lot like something you would see at Disneyland.

A tent full of cakes, pastries and cocktails that is shaped like a huge gingerbread house? I pretty much died and went to heaven.

We managed to squeeze onto a table and ordered some hot chocolate, a flammkuchen (German-style savoury pancake made with a thin bread-like base) and something I had never had before: Kaiserschmarrn. Apparently this translates to “pancake of the emperor”. My German is pretty basic, so I didn’t recognise some of the ingredients listed and although I did enjoy this dish, it had raisins in. Yuck. Raisins are the work of the devil.

After that we headed to the wine tent, the only tent at Oktoberfest that only serves one type of beer and not in a stein. The atmosphere in there is very different form many of the other tents; it has a generally older clientele consisting of groups of friends or older families. I thought the tent was one of the prettiest as it is completely wooden and the decorations are in Christmas colours. The food here also looked delicious, although more expensive than elsewhere.

We listened to the band for a while and got chatting to a Taiwanese family and German couple, but it was time to start drinking again. Somebody’s gotta do it, right?

We spotted a small, revolving carousel bar right near the main entrance and hopped on. They only sell weiss beer (not my favourite) so we didn’t stay long. But I did indulge in some tasty fish and chips as we left. You can take the girl out of England…

We had also promised ourselves that we would go on some of the rides that day too, but as it was raining we got a bit deflated on that front. Scott did, however, manage to persuade me to go on the swings, on which I spent most of the time shrieking that I thought my phone was going to fall out of my bag and having my hair plastered to my face through the drizzle. I’m totally not a wuss, you guys. Promise.

The main focus of this second day was trying to visit all of the beer tents, even if we didnt’t drink in them, just so that we could see them inside and take some photos. The atmosphere and clientele of a tent is immediately apparent as soon as you enter and so you can usually judge pretty quickly which ones are your favourites. For me, my favourites were the Schottenhammel, the Hacker Schorr Bayern Heaven and the wine tent, mainly because of the way they were decorated and the music that they played.

We enjoyed a couple of steins in the beer garden of the Spatenbrau tent and then headed over to the Bayern Heaven to end the night with some of Robbie William’s “Angels” and John Denver’s “Country Roads”. Everyone loves them, I have no idea why. We did have to queue and almost bribe the security to let us in, because at this point, all the tents were full, but with a little persistence and politeness, we made it in in the end.

As we left that evening and laughed at the people attempting the Gladiators-style conveyor belt ride, I felt a genuine sadness at having to go home.

This little two day break had felt almost like a holiday from our normal routine (as ridiculous as that sounds when travel is your “routine”), and Oktoberfest was something I’d wanted to go to for so long, that I felt sad that it was over already.

I’ll definitely be back, and I’ll be bringing my beer-soaked dirndl dress with me. Prost!