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27-03-2020, 10:13
Visit the Called to the bar site (http://maltworms.blogspot.com/2020/03/travel-stories-munich-oktoberfest.html)
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AOGPg1jXrME/XnyH_1rio8I/AAAAAAAAEQM/cC2afhPUDZkkjWt2hFKC9bK9r6fM2rIfACEwYBhgLKs4DAMBZV oBrxrgFwPt2zvRej_y72quGKbGlM6mPG5rlfW7x1XnxP_r-e8Dk_3SftQ3hAiekvoEKJjf9KbkBghkXnh7Imi2a5iKO2IQWfL 4fNfRi7y5-Dly3rDEMcNxwNWnxXFp7N0sN4nKrfvN11XrROoIZC8y0Sqlg8V DEwBVw16g4DkjgXNH-722fQLCqgjZckGK2mzOJMxOUaKSX61Qdlk5oMzjkA2ydN_r_9J bIj8UaMpXhne1odYnEZqf5WnwvDmvvM03H71CvxVMuP8u3nWUU dMolpCH2wnF8pPKLXUx7lc5-FJW7YWc-fd_9j-RvJS1SotPYK-C-hTPwPOhnCFhCG0TszVgOFfmegM_FcTw7ZEPpxC32-X5uaAX1TYuqFS44JdWQxAr5yxlFI1zmjpfDamG4ubiTwMV54_m bgEUMbgr04WPPrOEaHTgoNH7ZO4tg2LdwwOOcPaAwxIAe-DXGogwqQxpsBZOb2qRUvLbN_h4Qbl6hFqDacjnTVpnOuM8ZzYX 5Lq5lvIoLFH6f_60O2HWqlepNOBV639usI9lIoZwywOEe4v7Cz 8Z-vF1q_7nqpaw8zAvCB_SbkI9Cps9K3_ZE14bNTpopClT-MKiY8vMF/s320/IMG_8370.JPG (https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AOGPg1jXrME/XnyH_1rio8I/AAAAAAAAEQM/cC2afhPUDZkkjWt2hFKC9bK9r6fM2rIfACEwYBhgLKs4DAMBZV oBrxrgFwPt2zvRej_y72quGKbGlM6mPG5rlfW7x1XnxP_r-e8Dk_3SftQ3hAiekvoEKJjf9KbkBghkXnh7Imi2a5iKO2IQWfL 4fNfRi7y5-Dly3rDEMcNxwNWnxXFp7N0sN4nKrfvN11XrROoIZC8y0Sqlg8V DEwBVw16g4DkjgXNH-722fQLCqgjZckGK2mzOJMxOUaKSX61Qdlk5oMzjkA2ydN_r_9J bIj8UaMpXhne1odYnEZqf5WnwvDmvvM03H71CvxVMuP8u3nWUU dMolpCH2wnF8pPKLXUx7lc5-FJW7YWc-fd_9j-RvJS1SotPYK-C-hTPwPOhnCFhCG0TszVgOFfmegM_FcTw7ZEPpxC32-X5uaAX1TYuqFS44JdWQxAr5yxlFI1zmjpfDamG4ubiTwMV54_m bgEUMbgr04WPPrOEaHTgoNH7ZO4tg2LdwwOOcPaAwxIAe-DXGogwqQxpsBZOb2qRUvLbN_h4Qbl6hFqDacjnTVpnOuM8ZzYX 5Lq5lvIoLFH6f_60O2HWqlepNOBV639usI9lIoZwywOEe4v7Cz 8Z-vF1q_7nqpaw8zAvCB_SbkI9Cps9K3_ZE14bNTpopClT-MKiY8vMF/s1600/IMG_8370.JPG)
I was in the middle of a maelstrom, senses reeling, voices and screams around me batting through the air, the logic of noise making its point with the hammer of inevitability. A variety of coloured lights batted and bartered through the air, psychedelic in their movement but sly in meaning. The irony of a brass band playing The Sound of Silence at the sort of tempo punks used to pogo to was not lost on me, as all around drinkers, men and women, old and young, sensible and insensible, climbed onto tables to clink their bullet proof glasses and join in the singing, before breaking into raucous renditions of Ein Prosit, which struck me as perhaps an authentic version of stadium rock.
On that night at Oktoberfest, in 2014, having just trained in from three (or was it four?) rather tranquil days of drinking beer and visiting small breweries in northern Bohemia, I felt overwhelmed in the midst of what seemed like a mini-world of well-tailored chaos. Drunken men, their lederhosen stained by the flights of a thousand draughts of beer, strode around, with the bow-legged hilarity of sailors on a sloping, heaving deck during a summer storm, while the waitresses, arm muscles bulging above their standard issue dirndls, carried pots of beer to the well-oiled crowd, which that night as the more time I spent in their company seemed to merge into one strange mass.
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uANmo1wG9jk/XnyKnUXzOhI/AAAAAAAAEQY/IEoLotHfgaEgoVvwcm4ki8OuK2K6mfmbwCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/IMG_8020.JPG (https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uANmo1wG9jk/XnyKnUXzOhI/AAAAAAAAEQY/IEoLotHfgaEgoVvwcm4ki8OuK2K6mfmbwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/IMG_8020.JPG)
I stayed in Munich for three days and went back to the festival twice. I was on assignment for a glossy travel magazine and my plan was to get to the heart of the festival, for after all this was one of Europe’s celebrations of beer, drunkenness and the Bavarian identity. On that Sunday night, this heart seemed like an over-excited organ, overly strained and pulled this way and that by its elaborate anarchism, a wildness that even I, who has always travelled for beer (and will continue to do once this horrid little virus is put back in its box), thought was perhaps too much for me. And yet… I returned twice on the following two days, during the daylight hours, when the calm had settled on the festival like the hand of a parent on a fevered child’s brow. The fairground rides, high and haughty in their nighttime extravagance seemed normal, the screams that had made me think of the sounds of the damned in an ancient 1930s movie called Dante’s Inferno were now just all the fun of the fair. Families strolled, a small boy with a mohican and wearing lederhosen tried to look ferocious but failed when he smiled, while an American challenged an Italian to an arm wrestle, laughs and high fives all round. In the hall I was in, the music put on a speed accompanied by clapping and I felt a sense of communality pass through the crowd like a Mexican wave. It felt like the we’re-all-in-it-together of disco and then a woman passing by selling hats including one made of felt broke the spell.
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KcEoo2dqUAM/XnyII4smBfI/AAAAAAAAEQM/8U7a50-1-ukDNyDuILmHL3Y09bQuh9s5ACEwYBhgLKs4DAMBZVoAr5eYzMS rZ6MGUiA5sYr96sBp-GAP2p1n7UVC4kJDFMYvDbIEtgSjRzf9aCh2dpn1CFP18LNk76G mZvfvEzNEXx9CBj0o68VcAw5fLVGCiVqtUINB3VOncShXDYPvX iyirTeknll6luYWgxnJsCxAXexQ05xBN7p3EuyIZF2e6euIZp4 xJT34FmX7zlPg0FJpC1BwwkFZ5c0FW7nyalAzmUsG6YV6PU8fK q5ao80J8RkTfP-tBkFw2R7UG3Tfmd7hQ2GyS0Ni1WOGCUItVIRok3joECWRc1kZ5 wl_zysQsCQKY4xTv7l1ZhRzG4nRHJQbecShAn7_cPm1Ml44LpL inSTebYelo-CO2t_l1KU21pKPLP1VZ0fNquugJw8K7Kv-iNm5J7BYAHd8v3kdkCrO_WraFLQvqP9gmh62W76oivJMLkdETW sV9HhlIuUAyZSD5xV6J6tlQMQWBoltHG_CIs9I6kDDjhPf4M9S _rfjXlVuBsNPwsMHpUnJ1pHQEWYP3q0WoHUVahgD_V4o6HJgOz CWD5Pp9GT4CVPX9V26u2GprclSNJEJS_u3b9GhItm6PhOmr13S wchTj-UY2hvBtGo_ro-ISoWr2MKKa8vMF/s320/IMG_7991.JPG (https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KcEoo2dqUAM/XnyII4smBfI/AAAAAAAAEQM/8U7a50-1-ukDNyDuILmHL3Y09bQuh9s5ACEwYBhgLKs4DAMBZVoAr5eYzMS rZ6MGUiA5sYr96sBp-GAP2p1n7UVC4kJDFMYvDbIEtgSjRzf9aCh2dpn1CFP18LNk76G mZvfvEzNEXx9CBj0o68VcAw5fLVGCiVqtUINB3VOncShXDYPvX iyirTeknll6luYWgxnJsCxAXexQ05xBN7p3EuyIZF2e6euIZp4 xJT34FmX7zlPg0FJpC1BwwkFZ5c0FW7nyalAzmUsG6YV6PU8fK q5ao80J8RkTfP-tBkFw2R7UG3Tfmd7hQ2GyS0Ni1WOGCUItVIRok3joECWRc1kZ5 wl_zysQsCQKY4xTv7l1ZhRzG4nRHJQbecShAn7_cPm1Ml44LpL inSTebYelo-CO2t_l1KU21pKPLP1VZ0fNquugJw8K7Kv-iNm5J7BYAHd8v3kdkCrO_WraFLQvqP9gmh62W76oivJMLkdETW sV9HhlIuUAyZSD5xV6J6tlQMQWBoltHG_CIs9I6kDDjhPf4M9S _rfjXlVuBsNPwsMHpUnJ1pHQEWYP3q0WoHUVahgD_V4o6HJgOz CWD5Pp9GT4CVPX9V26u2GprclSNJEJS_u3b9GhItm6PhOmr13S wchTj-UY2hvBtGo_ro-ISoWr2MKKa8vMF/s1600/IMG_7991.JPG)
The beer? I drank deep in Munich over that period, though more in the town’s taverns than in the festival, where my notebook was a constant presence. My favourite in the festival was Augustiner’s Oktoberfest with its light and appetising bitterness, though it was run close by Hofbräu’s with its caramel sweetness and hint of lemon. Outside in the town, I was a constant presence in the Ayinger tap, somewhere to I went back to in 2018 and devoured a dunkel that nearly wrote a hymn to its presence, a mighty fortress is our god perhaps.
I doubt if I will return to Oktoberfest again, but to Munich I always want to go back (and then onto Bamburg and the upper reaches of Franconia), for after all travel broadens and stretches and tunes up the mind, which at this moment in time is rather restricted for all of us. But that will change.
More... (http://maltworms.blogspot.com/2020/03/travel-stories-munich-oktoberfest.html)
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AOGPg1jXrME/XnyH_1rio8I/AAAAAAAAEQM/cC2afhPUDZkkjWt2hFKC9bK9r6fM2rIfACEwYBhgLKs4DAMBZV oBrxrgFwPt2zvRej_y72quGKbGlM6mPG5rlfW7x1XnxP_r-e8Dk_3SftQ3hAiekvoEKJjf9KbkBghkXnh7Imi2a5iKO2IQWfL 4fNfRi7y5-Dly3rDEMcNxwNWnxXFp7N0sN4nKrfvN11XrROoIZC8y0Sqlg8V DEwBVw16g4DkjgXNH-722fQLCqgjZckGK2mzOJMxOUaKSX61Qdlk5oMzjkA2ydN_r_9J bIj8UaMpXhne1odYnEZqf5WnwvDmvvM03H71CvxVMuP8u3nWUU dMolpCH2wnF8pPKLXUx7lc5-FJW7YWc-fd_9j-RvJS1SotPYK-C-hTPwPOhnCFhCG0TszVgOFfmegM_FcTw7ZEPpxC32-X5uaAX1TYuqFS44JdWQxAr5yxlFI1zmjpfDamG4ubiTwMV54_m bgEUMbgr04WPPrOEaHTgoNH7ZO4tg2LdwwOOcPaAwxIAe-DXGogwqQxpsBZOb2qRUvLbN_h4Qbl6hFqDacjnTVpnOuM8ZzYX 5Lq5lvIoLFH6f_60O2HWqlepNOBV639usI9lIoZwywOEe4v7Cz 8Z-vF1q_7nqpaw8zAvCB_SbkI9Cps9K3_ZE14bNTpopClT-MKiY8vMF/s320/IMG_8370.JPG (https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AOGPg1jXrME/XnyH_1rio8I/AAAAAAAAEQM/cC2afhPUDZkkjWt2hFKC9bK9r6fM2rIfACEwYBhgLKs4DAMBZV oBrxrgFwPt2zvRej_y72quGKbGlM6mPG5rlfW7x1XnxP_r-e8Dk_3SftQ3hAiekvoEKJjf9KbkBghkXnh7Imi2a5iKO2IQWfL 4fNfRi7y5-Dly3rDEMcNxwNWnxXFp7N0sN4nKrfvN11XrROoIZC8y0Sqlg8V DEwBVw16g4DkjgXNH-722fQLCqgjZckGK2mzOJMxOUaKSX61Qdlk5oMzjkA2ydN_r_9J bIj8UaMpXhne1odYnEZqf5WnwvDmvvM03H71CvxVMuP8u3nWUU dMolpCH2wnF8pPKLXUx7lc5-FJW7YWc-fd_9j-RvJS1SotPYK-C-hTPwPOhnCFhCG0TszVgOFfmegM_FcTw7ZEPpxC32-X5uaAX1TYuqFS44JdWQxAr5yxlFI1zmjpfDamG4ubiTwMV54_m bgEUMbgr04WPPrOEaHTgoNH7ZO4tg2LdwwOOcPaAwxIAe-DXGogwqQxpsBZOb2qRUvLbN_h4Qbl6hFqDacjnTVpnOuM8ZzYX 5Lq5lvIoLFH6f_60O2HWqlepNOBV639usI9lIoZwywOEe4v7Cz 8Z-vF1q_7nqpaw8zAvCB_SbkI9Cps9K3_ZE14bNTpopClT-MKiY8vMF/s1600/IMG_8370.JPG)
I was in the middle of a maelstrom, senses reeling, voices and screams around me batting through the air, the logic of noise making its point with the hammer of inevitability. A variety of coloured lights batted and bartered through the air, psychedelic in their movement but sly in meaning. The irony of a brass band playing The Sound of Silence at the sort of tempo punks used to pogo to was not lost on me, as all around drinkers, men and women, old and young, sensible and insensible, climbed onto tables to clink their bullet proof glasses and join in the singing, before breaking into raucous renditions of Ein Prosit, which struck me as perhaps an authentic version of stadium rock.
On that night at Oktoberfest, in 2014, having just trained in from three (or was it four?) rather tranquil days of drinking beer and visiting small breweries in northern Bohemia, I felt overwhelmed in the midst of what seemed like a mini-world of well-tailored chaos. Drunken men, their lederhosen stained by the flights of a thousand draughts of beer, strode around, with the bow-legged hilarity of sailors on a sloping, heaving deck during a summer storm, while the waitresses, arm muscles bulging above their standard issue dirndls, carried pots of beer to the well-oiled crowd, which that night as the more time I spent in their company seemed to merge into one strange mass.
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uANmo1wG9jk/XnyKnUXzOhI/AAAAAAAAEQY/IEoLotHfgaEgoVvwcm4ki8OuK2K6mfmbwCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/IMG_8020.JPG (https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uANmo1wG9jk/XnyKnUXzOhI/AAAAAAAAEQY/IEoLotHfgaEgoVvwcm4ki8OuK2K6mfmbwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/IMG_8020.JPG)
I stayed in Munich for three days and went back to the festival twice. I was on assignment for a glossy travel magazine and my plan was to get to the heart of the festival, for after all this was one of Europe’s celebrations of beer, drunkenness and the Bavarian identity. On that Sunday night, this heart seemed like an over-excited organ, overly strained and pulled this way and that by its elaborate anarchism, a wildness that even I, who has always travelled for beer (and will continue to do once this horrid little virus is put back in its box), thought was perhaps too much for me. And yet… I returned twice on the following two days, during the daylight hours, when the calm had settled on the festival like the hand of a parent on a fevered child’s brow. The fairground rides, high and haughty in their nighttime extravagance seemed normal, the screams that had made me think of the sounds of the damned in an ancient 1930s movie called Dante’s Inferno were now just all the fun of the fair. Families strolled, a small boy with a mohican and wearing lederhosen tried to look ferocious but failed when he smiled, while an American challenged an Italian to an arm wrestle, laughs and high fives all round. In the hall I was in, the music put on a speed accompanied by clapping and I felt a sense of communality pass through the crowd like a Mexican wave. It felt like the we’re-all-in-it-together of disco and then a woman passing by selling hats including one made of felt broke the spell.
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KcEoo2dqUAM/XnyII4smBfI/AAAAAAAAEQM/8U7a50-1-ukDNyDuILmHL3Y09bQuh9s5ACEwYBhgLKs4DAMBZVoAr5eYzMS rZ6MGUiA5sYr96sBp-GAP2p1n7UVC4kJDFMYvDbIEtgSjRzf9aCh2dpn1CFP18LNk76G mZvfvEzNEXx9CBj0o68VcAw5fLVGCiVqtUINB3VOncShXDYPvX iyirTeknll6luYWgxnJsCxAXexQ05xBN7p3EuyIZF2e6euIZp4 xJT34FmX7zlPg0FJpC1BwwkFZ5c0FW7nyalAzmUsG6YV6PU8fK q5ao80J8RkTfP-tBkFw2R7UG3Tfmd7hQ2GyS0Ni1WOGCUItVIRok3joECWRc1kZ5 wl_zysQsCQKY4xTv7l1ZhRzG4nRHJQbecShAn7_cPm1Ml44LpL inSTebYelo-CO2t_l1KU21pKPLP1VZ0fNquugJw8K7Kv-iNm5J7BYAHd8v3kdkCrO_WraFLQvqP9gmh62W76oivJMLkdETW sV9HhlIuUAyZSD5xV6J6tlQMQWBoltHG_CIs9I6kDDjhPf4M9S _rfjXlVuBsNPwsMHpUnJ1pHQEWYP3q0WoHUVahgD_V4o6HJgOz CWD5Pp9GT4CVPX9V26u2GprclSNJEJS_u3b9GhItm6PhOmr13S wchTj-UY2hvBtGo_ro-ISoWr2MKKa8vMF/s320/IMG_7991.JPG (https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KcEoo2dqUAM/XnyII4smBfI/AAAAAAAAEQM/8U7a50-1-ukDNyDuILmHL3Y09bQuh9s5ACEwYBhgLKs4DAMBZVoAr5eYzMS rZ6MGUiA5sYr96sBp-GAP2p1n7UVC4kJDFMYvDbIEtgSjRzf9aCh2dpn1CFP18LNk76G mZvfvEzNEXx9CBj0o68VcAw5fLVGCiVqtUINB3VOncShXDYPvX iyirTeknll6luYWgxnJsCxAXexQ05xBN7p3EuyIZF2e6euIZp4 xJT34FmX7zlPg0FJpC1BwwkFZ5c0FW7nyalAzmUsG6YV6PU8fK q5ao80J8RkTfP-tBkFw2R7UG3Tfmd7hQ2GyS0Ni1WOGCUItVIRok3joECWRc1kZ5 wl_zysQsCQKY4xTv7l1ZhRzG4nRHJQbecShAn7_cPm1Ml44LpL inSTebYelo-CO2t_l1KU21pKPLP1VZ0fNquugJw8K7Kv-iNm5J7BYAHd8v3kdkCrO_WraFLQvqP9gmh62W76oivJMLkdETW sV9HhlIuUAyZSD5xV6J6tlQMQWBoltHG_CIs9I6kDDjhPf4M9S _rfjXlVuBsNPwsMHpUnJ1pHQEWYP3q0WoHUVahgD_V4o6HJgOz CWD5Pp9GT4CVPX9V26u2GprclSNJEJS_u3b9GhItm6PhOmr13S wchTj-UY2hvBtGo_ro-ISoWr2MKKa8vMF/s1600/IMG_7991.JPG)
The beer? I drank deep in Munich over that period, though more in the town’s taverns than in the festival, where my notebook was a constant presence. My favourite in the festival was Augustiner’s Oktoberfest with its light and appetising bitterness, though it was run close by Hofbräu’s with its caramel sweetness and hint of lemon. Outside in the town, I was a constant presence in the Ayinger tap, somewhere to I went back to in 2018 and devoured a dunkel that nearly wrote a hymn to its presence, a mighty fortress is our god perhaps.
I doubt if I will return to Oktoberfest again, but to Munich I always want to go back (and then onto Bamburg and the upper reaches of Franconia), for after all travel broadens and stretches and tunes up the mind, which at this moment in time is rather restricted for all of us. But that will change.
More... (http://maltworms.blogspot.com/2020/03/travel-stories-munich-oktoberfest.html)