Oktoberfest®

Six million people, eight million liters of beer, lots of meat & potatoes & pretzels & cookies, followed by roller coaster rides on the midway. Oktoberfest is really kind of a fiasco. Waxing nostalgic over a lost agricultural tradition, locals complain that it has turned into a two-week circus of drunkenness, vulgarity and crass commercialism for tourists. Stay the hell away from it, they kept telling us, as we followed them all down there for "family day" this past Tuesday afternoon (it's all staged at a 64-acre fairground in the center of Munich).

 

Lots of people show up in dirndls and lederhosen, some of which are authentic, and many of which are costume quality, lending Oktoberfest the spirit of a Halloween party. But entrepreneurial Müncheners just roll with it: They've put up a bunch of haunted houses along the midway. Hannah and Tobias went into one of them. Eight euros and three minutes later they informed me that Germans just have no idea how to do a haunted house.

 

Most of the eating and drinking takes place inside the cavernous beer halls. But food stalls along the midway tame voracious appetites, too.

 Oh, look. There's one of those beer halls I mentioned.

Utterly sissified by Germany's lack of a Second Amendment, Bavarian husbands heed the call of their inner guy at the BB shooting galleries along the midway.

The Oktoberfest Committee for the Prevention of Virtue and the Protection of Vice.

Michelle's take on the whole thing? "Oktoberfest is like a big frat party," she says. She expressed her disapproval just a little too strenuously and maybe one too many times the other night, and Hannah announced ever so nonchalantly, "In a few years I'm coming back to Munich so I can got to Oktoberfest on the weekend, at night." In a low-cut dirndl, I suspect.

I am on a roller coaster hurtling towards Maybe-I-don't-want-to-know.