Oktoberfest 2013 - Munich

Hallo!

Last Saturday the 28th September we went to the famous Munich Oktoberfest and I'm here to tell you all about the experience.

I had actually expected Oktoberfest to be quite different since it is a festival open to anyone, with attractions, stalls and booths. In the Oktoberfest grounds you can find various areas: on one side booths advertising different brands of beer where you go in to drink, on the other side, stalls where you can buy beer which are open to everyone, but are not necessary to go in to; the prices are approximately 5€ for half a litre of beer in the stalls. We also found festival attractions, booths selling typical German food and so many souvenir shops.

We decided to go to Munich by train since it was the cheapest way to get there (it cost us 70€ there and back for 7 people, so it was only 10€ for a return journey per person. We got our tickets for this price because we went to Munich and came back on the same day, if you wanted to come back the next day, the ticket prices doubled. We caught the 11am train from the main station in Salzburg and arrived at 1:30pm in the main station in Munich. Once there, we decided to follow a large group of people to get to Oktoberfest, it was actually quite easy since the majority of people were dressed in traditional outfits.

On arrival we ate at one of the stalls at the entrance and then we started to walk to see what the atmosphere was like. We saw that it would be too complicated to get in to one of the stalls because there were so many people waiting by the door and a lot of them were indicating with their hands the amount of people there were in the stall. We asked around in different stalls and they told us that to get in you had to have a bracelet to indicate that you had reserved a place, but whenever anyone left the stall, they decided who went in to take their place. Therefore, we decided that after an hour of wandering around, we would go to have a beer by the entrance of the festival.

After that, we decided to try to get in to one of the stalls. Since we had gone to Munich, we didn't want to have been there without seeing anything. We stayed for a while in a couple of booths, and in the second one, we even managed to get to the front row after almost an hour, but since the way everything was working, it was impossible to get in and in the end we just gave up.

We saw that after the whole day of trying to get into the stall, we realised it would be impossible so we went to return to Salzburg because we had been out the night before and got up early that morning so were were pretty tired. Although, before we left, we went back to the souvenir stalls so we could get something to take back with us to remember our time at Oktoberfest.

Finally, after another two and a half hour train ride that was seeming to be quite long, we arrived in Salzburg and we had officially completed our visit to Oktoberfest.

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