Sausage is the beer's girlfriend

We arrived in Munich around nine in the morning. None of us had gotten much sleep due to the night train bunks and getting moving was pretty rough. And then we had to find our way out of the German train station, navigate the streets of Munich, and find the hotel. The area of town around the train station is filled with hotels, and strip clubs. OK then. We find Hotel Monaco without too much trouble and drop off our luggage since our room isn't ready. At a nearby pedestrian mall we find a coffee shop and grab some caffenine. And then it hits us. We're in Germany, our third country in seven days, and it's Oktoberfest. Awesome. Now if we could only keep our eyes open.

With a little more time to kill before we can check in to the hotel, we head down the pedestrian mall to the center of town called the Marienplatz. The whole area looks new but done in an older style. And it turns out that is true since most of the area was bombed to shit in WWII. And upon realizing that, it gets a little weird to be in Germany. Moving on. On one side of the Marienplatz is the "new" town hall. I say new because it looks to be a few hundred years old and the guidebook says it survived the bombing. This building has a giant clock with dancing people kinda like a cococlock and a glockenspiel inside. Melissa goes off to do some shopping and Jerry and I wait for the show. It's a little odd. I mean it's just a big coocooclock. Anyway, was interesting to see. We head back to the hotel, get into the room, spend some time getting settled, and go back out to get food. We find a place back on the pedestrian mall and we all get authentic German food and beer. Jerry had wurst, I had weinerschnitzel, and Melissa had German meatloaf. German food, with beer of course, is awesome. We go back to the hotel, shower, and nap.

Felling a little more refreshed, we take the fifteen minute walk to the Weisen, where Oktoberfest is held. Imagine JazzFest, cover it all in tents and rides, now add in all the track space and green space and any spare space you can think of and put more tents and rides. And by tents I mean huge structures that don't look temporary at all. And by rides I mean things like six loop rollercoasters. It's a sight to see. We should all go next year.

We walked through some tents, but couldn't find a free spot inside, so we grabbed a seat at a table outside in the Paulener area. For as much drinking goes on at Oktoberfest, you can't take the drinks out of the tent area, so you do all your drinking at the table. We order a round, liters of course, and get to drinking. Feeling a little hungry, we get an English menu. On the menu is written "Sausage is the beer's girlfriend." Hell yeah it is. I order bratwurst. Who cares what everyone else ordered. We order more beer. Liters are big. Yo.

After finishing our food and beer, we walk around again. It's like a big fair, people everywhere, all the girls in the Bavarian outfits. A few guys wearing the lederhousin. We find another tent, not sure which one, and order more beer. It's a little chilly but there is a heat lamp nearby so it works out. All the bangs inside the tents play 80s music all the time. The highlight was hearing 99 red balloons, in German of course. They also play some German drinking song, but we had no idea what they were saying. They even did the Ziggy Zoggy thing a few times. For as nutty as the whole event is, it shuts down early, shutting things down around 10:15. We finish up our beers, and get back to the hotel around 11.