Oktoberfest is the word. Breaking down the word, ‘Oktober’ is the German word for October and ‘fest’ being the German term for the English lingo referred to as a festival. In recent times, many a people ask “Nath mate. You drink beer. Have for a few years now. Why on earth would a festival that is supposed to be held in October, start in late September?” Call me Dr Karl Kruszelnicki because the answer is an easy one my friends. When the annual tradition commenced back in the olden days, the festival was actually in October. You see the time of the festival never changes however due to the earths rotation, every year the festival times change by a few minutes. It’s the similar effect of the days of the year and why we have a leap year every four years. Sure, Oktoberfest could work as a leap year system so it would be held in October every year but due to everybody participating being absolutely shit faced all the time, organisers are worried that the lack of memory would prohibit such changes to take place. Under s52 of the ‘Bier Festival Act’, sch3 states ‘no changes shall be made to amend dates of Oktoberfest unless in accordance to all participants forbidding the drinking of bier upon themselves in protest. In this case, the court of law will rule in favour of the required and necessary changes to this Act.’ In essence, I guess it’s a bit like daylight savings. Farmers don’t have it because it mucks up the feeding time for animals. Similarly, Oktoberfest doesn’t have the equivalent to daylight savings so it doesn’t muck up the drinking schedule of animals.

After checking in to Wombat Hostel, our livers prepared for four days of obliteration and abuse. The Battlers started their experience of Occatoberfest as it became known. First up, they went to the Hoffbrau House, an old bier hall, for the Busabout orientation. It was there the schnity devouring and bier drinking began.

The following morning, the Backpacking Battlers put on their laderhosens, ‘Backpacking Battlers’ t-shirts and a pair of Havvies and they walked for ten minutes to get to the festival. In the lead up to this event, even since last year, I had the impression that Oktoberfest was going to be a few canvas tents put up on some grass surrounded by a couple of buildings. My perksception was wrong. Oktoberfest is around the size of the Easter Show with massive buildings, referred to as tents, which house thousands of people every day, along with rides and food stalls. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Throughout the three days we were there, the Battlers went to the Hoffbrau, Haker and Lowenbrau tents. Inside the tents are hundreds of long tables surrounding an elevated stage featuring a German band. The protocol is as follows:
Find a seat at a table; wait for the bier maid who has been designated the table you’re sitting at to come past; order a stein for about €10; once everyone has a bier, cheers everyone on your table by raising your stein and yelling the German word for cheers, ‘PROST!’; drink many many steins (Eddie and I drank around six every day and that gets you properly ruined); get up on the chairs and tables to dance; find a female to have a smooch with; struggle home; have a sleep and do it all again the next day. That’s the main jist of it.
Each time a bier maid placed another litre of God’s urine in front of me, I was skeptical as to how or if we were going to make it out sober, let alone alive.

The second day we participated was a Saturday. This meant that if you weren’t at the front door of a tent by 7am then you didn’t stand a chance to get inside. The boys in our dorm, including ourselves as we are also boys, didn’t make it. Eddie, Taylor (bloke from Melbourne staying in our dorm) and I ended up going to one of the tents’ bier garden to get rowdy there. After I told a German girl who was keen that we’d talk in about three steins time, the wee situation occurred. There was a massive line for the only toilet available to us in the bier garden as even that was now closed to the public. The option ended up being that we were given, by the seco’s, a business card, better known as a ‘wee card’. This meant we could leave the bier garden, have a wee on a nearby hill, called ‘wee hill’, and then being able to jump the line and get back in.

One of the most enjoyable things about the last four days is that everyone who is there has a very similar mindset. That’s one of the best parts about backpacking is that we are all here for the same reason so there’s rarely a wet blanket. If there was any advice I could give to anybody in their life, it would be to come over to Germany and live Oktoberfest style. You’d never regret it. To put it in perspective, Occatoberfest is in my top five for the best things I’ve ever done in my life

There are so many stories I want to write about in this blog but the ruthlessness of most of them, not even an absent Ruth could handle. Tough decision to make this G rated but decided that some stories are better left to pub or barbie conversation