Activities, Action and Alcohol:

 

Oktoberfest is a party designed for millions of people to come and drink beer, but its also a family-friendly festival full of things to do and see. There are carousels and pony rides for the youngens, and some extreme thrill-fulfilling rides for the more mature or drunk. There are shooting games and bells to hammer to win cheesy prizes like colourful plastic roses. There’s the ‘old’ part of Oktoberfest, a small section of the festival where they’ve tried to recreate Oktoberfest as it was in the good old days – smaller roller coasters, cheaper rides, and calmer beer gardens with bigger bands and a place to dance. There are competitions, one of the most famous being the Miss Bavaria contest: Miss Bavaria is a woman who can roll the best dumplings, clean a carpet with an old style wacker, and hold a liter of beer and head of cabbage up in the air for longest. There’s always live music, where only songs that the crowd can sing along with are played, and once a night 6 men arrive with whips they snap in beat with the band. At the end of the night, a male strip tease happens at the Braurosl tent, Im not sure about the others. All the sexy action between Oktoberfest lovers happens behind the festival on this one stretch of green hill where others also take time to nap, pee, or vomit.

 

Beer, Beer, Beer: Oktoberfest centers around 14 beer tents, which are more like warehouses each full of 10,000 people drinking mugs of beer. The mugs

are made of glass or stone and only come in 1L size, and all cost 10 euros after tip. Tipping gets expensive after a while since the beers only cost about 8.75 and the beers are never full, but that’s part of the deal. Most of the tents are

run by a different brewery, so each tent only serves one type of beer. And you cant buy wine or schnapps, its just all about the beer. Bavarian beer, of course. But it is kosher to mix your beer with carbonated lemonade, and if you blend it half half its called a radler. And Boobs are also important, but Ill get to that at “D.”

Cookies, Chickens and Cuisine:

 

Heart-shaped cookies with messages like “Greetings from Oktoberfest” or “I Love you” come in a variety of sizes, and are worn as necklaces to enhance the Bavarian costumes everyone wears. In the tents, you can order food from a small menu, and almost everyone at Oktoberfest ends up eating rotisserie chickenwhich is half a greasy chicken served on a plate. Pretzels and sausages are everywhere, in all different shapes and sizes. It isn’t exactly fine dining cuisine, but its everything you need after 3L of beer! Oh, and clothes pins. Everyone needs their name etched on a clothes pin. And then there’s the clothes…

Die Dirndl und die Lederhosen: The men wear leather shorts, held up with leather suspenders. They wear a white or checkered shirt underneath, knee-high white socks, and suede shoes. Some enhance with a hat, or a felt overcoat, and sometimes the leather suspenders has a badge on their chest with fancy embroidery, spelling out their family name or home town. The women wear a dirndl, a traditional dress with an apron tied on top and a fluffy-shoulder white blouse and 1 – 3 bras underneath.The push up bra is a very important part of the outfit, and you almost always need more than one to get the appropriate amount of cleavage sticking out of your dirndl, which also needs to be uncomfortable tight around your chest to help the cause. Some women wear crazy heels, but its better to wear flats that you can last in all day and keep your balance while dancing on the benches and tables everyone ends up standing on by the end of the night.