Collegiettes™! How’s everyone doing on this lovely Tuesday morning? I happen to still be in recovery mode from my whirlwind weekend at Oktoberfest! For those of you who haven’t heard of it (I most certainly hadn’t before beginning my abroad plans, but apparently I am in the minority), Oktoberfest is essentially a German beer festival. I know, right? Not exactly something you would picture me enjoying, but honestly, it was the time of my life.
Because I had been dragging my feet on booking anything for this trip all summer long, despite almost-daily reminders from my group of friends attempting to organize this little excursion, Kristen & had to scramble to figure out travel plans once we actually arrived in Florence. Flash-forward to this weekend, and we are stuck spending Oktoberfest camping. As in, sleeping bags, tents, wildlife, woods…the whole 9 yards. I’ve never spent a night in my backyard, let alone an entire weekend in Germany… But hey, it’s all about the experience, right?
The site actually wound up being one of the coolest set-ups I have ever seen. The program was run by all of these 20-something Australians who spend their time running trips like this all over Europe (kind of beats interning, no?) Kristen & I kept saying we felt like we were getting a mini experience in Australian culture…(did you guys know they say “heaps of” instead of “lots of”?) Obviously we just could not get enough…I’m pretty sure we spent half of Oktoberfest engaging every Australian we met in annoying conversation. One actually even said to Kristen, “You know, you sure do ask a lot of questions…” Fantastic.
But on to the actual Oktoberfest! Like I said, I really didn’t know too much about what to expect from this. Everyone kept telling me about “beer gardens” and “drinking tents”, but honestly that went in one ear and out the other. My knowledge of beer is pretty much limited to how much a 30 costs and whether Keystone or Natty Lite tastes better. Anyways…The best way I could describe walking into the festival is this: it’s like walking on to a boardwalk in the USA (Jersey, perhaps? I do spend my summers in Seaside…) The difference is, people are dressed as beer maids, everything is in German, and the air smells strongly of sausage. Seriously.
The drinking tents are these enormous halls filled with wooden tables and food stalls. All of them have these elaborate names (none of which I could pronounce, duh.) We spent the majority of our weekend in one tent and wound up being surrounded by a ton of people from Wake Forest! It was the coolest experience ever, albeit disorienting. Like a frat party, in Europe. What.
Every few minutes, the band in the tent would start playing “Sweet Caroline” or “New York, New York”, and the entire hall would erupt in singing and swilling their gigantic beer mugs. It was honestly like nothing I have ever seen before.
In typical fashion, eventually Kristen and I managed to get separated (and/or ditched…) by our entire group of friends. The dynamic duo that we are, we decided to spend the rest of our Saturday afternoon wandering the fair grounds and chatting with the other fest-ers (an exhausting task, I might add, considering most are German and we don’t know a single conversational phrase in their language). I am fairly certain we managed to get in to at least 5 different tents, all through backdoors opened for us by the random security guards we’d chatted with, smiling. Hey, I told you guys I was a people person…
At last the weekend drew to a close, and it was time for us to return to our beautiful home city, Firenze. As you can imagine, I am absolutely wiped out, and desperately looking forward to a quiet week and weekend here in Italy.
Yeah, you’re right…who am I kidding? When it comes to me & studying abroad, things never stay quiet for long.
Until next week, collegiettes™!