So this past weekend we finally completed one of Radek’s many goals while living in Ireland - we went to Oktoberfest in Munich. First, a video, which is self-explanatory:
Open “Full Entry” and click here for a video of: Oktoberfest 2008
As you can see, this was quite a busy place…. let us back up, though….
First, Radek is able to check-in online with good ol’ RyanAir but Heather is discriminated against because she’s not an EU Citizen and must check-in at the airport (and pay a 5 Euro fee, which is supposed to be reimburseable). As luck would have it, our bus to the airport was stuck in traffic for 45 minutes and, as you can imagine, Heather missed the check-in time for the airplane. So, off Radek went towards Munich, and Heather got re-scheduled for a plane to Frankfurt. Through the beauty of cell phones, we were able to communicate enough to coordinate a meeting in Heidelberg, which about 50 kilometers (about 30 miles) from our hotel. It was a very late night, and an even earlier morning, to catch our train to Munich.
We arrived in Munich at 10:30 Saturday morning and were pleased to find our home for the evening in the beautiful and clean Hotel Beer. We were only a couple minutes walk from the subway system and made it to Munich without any further difficulties.
The Oktoberfest grounds are quite amazing…. it is huge! The first thing we walked into was the amusement park with a ton of rides - no beer tent in sight, which we found impressive. When we thought of Oktoberfest, we thought only of beer, but there was quite a bit more to it than that. They had a wonderful selection of food, and that’s coming from the vegetarians (although we’re glad that we eat fish, or we may have been in a bit of trouble.) Radek just can’t get over the variety of fish being served, the best of which was the baked mackerel in our beer-garden. They had sandwiches made from salmon, cod, herring, etc. Plus, they had all kinds of sweets and goodness - form pretzels to cotton candy to roasted-sugary nuts.
We were not fortunate enough to have tickets for seats in any of the 12 large beer tents (and you must have a seat in a tent in order to be served beer or food in that tent). After wandering around for quite awhile, we found our way to the Hippodrome beer tent, but because there were a few people waiting to enter, we decided to go elsewhere. We chose the fish tent (for obvious reasons) and decided to wait out the line to get through the door. After four hours of watching the security guards let in their friends and no one else, we gave up - especially when we saw people with reservations showing their tickets and being refused entry. So, we went to the nearby bier-garten to find a seat, which came quite quickly.
There, we met some great people and had a ton of laughs, as you can see in some of our pictures here. They were kind enough to speak English to us, if they could. Radek especially made the rounds meeting new people from all over - whether they could understand each other or not. You may notice a few superheros in our photos - yes, Spiderman, Superman, the Hulk and others were in our tent! And I think they came all the way from the UK 
Although we were literally exhausted and fell in to bed when we got back to Dublin, we had a wonderful time and enjoyed our weekend there. Our number one recommendation, though - make sure you get reservations to the beer tent. We would have enjoyed seeing the dancing and hearing more traditional music, which we didn’t really get in the beer-garden (although we could see it through the glass windows, beyond the mean security guards, so better than nothing) but we did meet some great people and had some wonderful fish sandwiches!
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Ireland