We arrived in Germany in the morning on Thursday and after dealing with formalities, picking up the rental car, etc. we headed off towards Munich for one evening at Oktoberfest. We hit some pretty crazy traffic and didn’t arrive until around dinner time. We had little Fiat 500 (smallest car ever) but Matt had the joy of testing out the German Autobahn which turned out to be pretty fun with its lack of speed limits . At Oktoberfest we got ourselves some bratwurst (we didn’t know what anything else on the menu said, so went with something safe) and then headed into a few of the tents to check things out. Oktoberfest is actually kind of like a county fair with lots of rides, families, and fair-food, but also happens to include large tents full of happy beer-drinking people. Upon entering the tent we were mystified as to how one was supposed to acquire a beer: there were waitresses hurrying around carrying eight 1 liter steins but no one seemed to want to sell us one and when we asked we were always just pointed in some other direction without any explanation. The tents were pretty crowded and the tables were all quite full but eventually when we asked one waitress she shoved some Germans down the bench and shoved us down onto the bench and told us she would be back with some beer. Apparently you need to be sitting at a table to be served. No ID required though. In this way we made friends (being shoved down next to them) and we spent the rest of the night with Stefan and company drinking beer and dancing on the benches to American music with thousands of other people. Those Germans sure know how to throw a party!!
The next morning we were on our way back to Frankfurt early early. We turned in the rental car and took a train to Mainz, which is a smaller town outside of Frankfurt where Chris & Bernie live. We spent the afternoon wandering around Mainz which had an adorable old town and market. My camera didn’t make it out of the car so I don’t really have any pictures of the city, but it was really nice. After a relaxing afternoon of catching up with Bernie we headed over to the airfield. I’m going to make that a separate post so I can upload some videos and do it justice. It was awesome.
Friday evening we met up with Chris in Darmsdat (another city outside of Frankfurt). He was having a party at his apartment so we got to catch up with him and make a lot of new friends. We had a fun evening hanging out and meeting new people.
Saturday we all slept in, had a long breakfast and spent some more time exploring Mainz. Its right on the Rhine river and there is a huge park along the waterfront so we wandered through the park, across the river and such. We went to a small brewery called Eisgrub bier which was in this cool building that must have been a zillion years old and got to sample a bunch of different German beers and try out Schnitzel, which was quite good. More general hanging out and wandering and then went to a birthday party for one of their friends where we got to hang out with a lot of the same fun people from the night before and meet some new ones. The night ended with checking out the local nightlife at a club and a beer in the park. After a few short hours of sleep we got up Sunday morning and headed for the Frankfurt airport to continue on to Morocco. We had an awesome and relaxing time catching up with Chris & Bernie and getting to experience a bit of Germany. We felt really lucky that almost everyone there spoke very good English, though since we could pass for Germans we often got babbled at in German first.. A change from Latin America where everyone immediately identifies us as gringos. We also felt really lucky to have such fun, generous hosts who didn’t mind us inviting ourselves to see them.
and here's a video of Oktoberfest :)
No comments:
Post a Comment