OKTOBERFEEEEEEEEEEEST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So I'm unsure how this entry will go length wise… let's find out shall we?

After being told that we'd need to get up super early to get a seat at a tent, we rocked up to the grounds at about 8:45. At this point there was nobody there at all. Literally no one. With the exception of a few groups of school kids. That's right there were groups of 5 year old kids at Oktoberfest. Sadly none of them were willing to get into a drinking contest with me.

After cruising the grounds for a while we ended up chatting to a group of Kiwis and eventually ended up going into the Lowenbrau tent to drink with them. Luckily the beer started flowing at 10am and so after a stein or two I was nicely drunk. By 2pm I was legally classified as furniture.

Here's what I do remember: drinking and drinking and drinking. I'd had about 5 or 6 steins when I realized that I severely needed to go for a walk and clear my head (but only after I'd eaten half a roast chicken which was incredibly tasty). I went outside and got some fresh air, then got a message from Sarah asking where I was because apparently I'd been gone for a little while. At this point I was sure I'd sent her a message saying "I'm near some rides". According to my phone message history I sent her a blank message, one that said I was walking around the festival, one that said I was near some rides, one that said "rides ire", one that said rides were a bad idea (I'm pretty sure I didn't go on a ride, so I have nfi what that's about) and that I'd meet her at the hostel and another blank message.

I vaguely remember walking back to the hostel after making the executive decision that I would either pass out at the festival or leg it back there. Legging it back was the better idea and so I crashed out on the bed and woke up a few hours later still drunk.

From what I've been told, I missed out on a few small things. First was the sight of one of our tablemates throwing up into his own stein.Also, apparently the day before the lines for the toilets had been so long that guys had been slyly whipping it out under the table and, uh… "refilling" their steins, then putting them on the ground and sliding them away… It's 100% class at Oktoberfest.

At this point Sarah, our roommate and myself decided to head back so I could get a stein and to have a last look around. Once there I laughed my ass off as the Augustiner tent was playing "Living Next Door to Alice" which was liberally peppered with a tent full of drunks yelling "Alice? Who the f*** is Alice?!". A bit of a cruise around and I got a rollmop in a bun for dinner and a piece of pork and even got to jump on one of the airgun target range things they used to have at the Melbourne show (the ones where you shoot the tin ducks and stuff). This one was totally rigged though. The sights on the gun were working fine, there's no argument about that. They had roses held on by small porcelain cylinders about the size of a pen cap. I had no trouble shooting them and they exploded rather easily from the pellets meaning that I won three fake roses (I gave two to Sarah and one to our roommate). The problem came when I went to shoot the circle tin targets; the bullets just bounced of them. I'd hit them in the center, at the top, at the bottom, on the left and right edges and all to no avail. I managed to get one of them down and that was it. Very annoying as I knew my aim was perfect and there was nothing I could do except start shooting the rose-holders which I knew would drop when hit.

That was it for Oktoberfest though, and so we walked back home and packed up our stuff again. The walk home was interesting as we'd seen a bunch of people so drunk their mates had to carry them, a bunch of people collapsing, one girl did the most impressive faceplant I've ever seen, lay motionless for about 8 seconds, then popped back up and started chattering away like nothing had happened. Apparently one of our kiwi mates even saw an 8 year old drunk as all hell…

After a sleep it's time to head off to Prague!

Fun Fact: The Germans have an awesome invention; the beer wiping band. When drinking from a stein you will invariably get beer around your mouth. As such, they sell a forearm band that is for the sole purpose of wiping this beer off. I now own one of these and love it.