Adventures in Europe, Part III

I confess I had been getting nervous in the days leading up to Oktoberfest. I had wondered what I was doing. I don’t like beer nor the smell of smoke, huge drunken crowds make me nervous, and was I maybe falling into a tourist trap?

The first few hours were a lot of fun, and most of its awkward moments just make for great stories the next day. A CMC friend and I ended up in a tent with a group of three nice middle-aged Brits to one side, and a Texan Iraq vet coming back to Germany to visit two friends he made while recovering here. The Brits and the Texan were lovely–I find the more I travel, the more I appreciate the general friendliness of anglophones– but one of the German friends kept trying to touch my hair, at one point tried to take a picture down my shirt, asked me to marry him, and kept blowing on me to try to get my attention once I had switched places with someone and was ignoring him.

Then I caused more trouble: when I was scanning the crowd, I caught someone staring at me, looked away, looked back, and saw he was still staring at me. Then I accidentally made eye contact. He waves. Crap. I tell my friend to look after me because I think I’m about to cause trouble again, would he just please look to his right, and watch the guy in the Brazil jersey. He doesn’t hear me. Some idiot lets the Brazilian guy in. He professes his love for me and tells me that I have the most beautiful eyes in the crowd. I tell him my boyfriend loves me and thinks my eyes are beautiful too. Once he figures out the friend I’m traveling with isn’t my boyfriend, he invokes the area codes rule and tells me I am in Europe, at Oktoberfest, and that I needed to seize my youth. Umm, no. I finally convince him that I won’t make out with him and that he needs to leave the table. A few minutes later, I look over and there’s a woman sitting where the Brazilian once was. “You need to forget your boyfriend,” she says. “My friend, he fell in love with you, he wants to marry you, he’s sitting there crying in the toilet because you rejected him.” I look over, and he yells “Marry me.” I tell her he’d have less problems if he didn’t fall in love so quickly, kick her out, and tell the British people not to let any more people over.

Despite the weirdness that’s going on (an obscene amount of people are trying to touch my red hair amidst all of this), I’m still mostly enjoying myself. A band is leading the crowd in a lot of German songs, people are dancing, and singing, and there’s a lot of amusing sights to occupy any perennial people watcher. However, I didn’t realize just how drunk my friend was getting.

We leave the tent because I get hungry and the only vegetarian option in the tent is a pretzel. Because we couldn’t find lodging in Munich, my friend and I had decided to catch the first morning train back to Freiburg, and pulling an all-nighter would require much more sustenance. (And, I might add, NOT getting trashed… AHEM!)

My friend finds a restroom and decides he needs to go in. I tell him I’ll go use the ladies room and to wait for me once he’s done. I come out, and I don’t see him. Since when has a men’s line moved more slowly than a women’s? A few more minutes go by, and I start to wonder if he’s not ok in there. Then I run into someone from my own program. I stop him, he rubs my hair, (what is it with drunk people and red hair?), and then a number of other IESers pop out of the crowd. We talk for a few minutes, I send them into the restroom to check up on my friend, and they don’t find him. Then they leave and tell me to call them once I find my friend. I send my friend an angry text message telling him to go back to where he last saw me because I haven’t moved.

A few minutes later, another IESer, Grant, pops out. He had been separated from his friends, and he couldn’t reach them. We wait together another half an hour. I’m not drunk, so I don’t have the same shelter from the cold that everybody else seems to, so we move to the heated beer garden right across from the restrooms. Despite me popping out every couple minutes to see if my friend’s there, I can’t meet up with him. We’ve been separated for over an hour. And he’s a drunk, obnoxious American who is pretending to be Italian to anybody who’ll listen. Oy. We start looking for him, and I give Grant the very clear rule that he is to hold my hand the entire time and NOT LET GO. One woman did ask whether I was going to keep him all night or if she could have him when I was done, so I did have a moment of comedic relief.

Oktoberfest closes at 11pm. Grant and I head over to the train station, reasoning that would be a pretty standard meeting spot. He was partially right. All the other IESers were there too. Still no sign of my friend. The last time I saw him was around 8:30. I’ve run out of credit trying to call him, and no one else could get through to him either. My friends were on a train leaving at 3:30, but mine wasn’t until 5:30. I decide to go to the police station in the train station to ask if I could sit in there in the time between their train and mine. Being female, red-headed, and by yourself in a train station after Oktoberfest isn’t an intelligent move, and I figure they’d appreciate my trying to be proactive for my safety. No. They refused to talk to me, instead occupying themselves with people who had committed all sorts of drunken debauchery. I cry for a couple minutes, and all the IES boys awkwardly pet my hair and tell me not to. So I stop.

We sit around in the freezing cold station for hours.  Around 2:30 in the morning, my friend shows up. He didn’t remember how we had separated. It hadn’t occurred to him that wandering off from the one person he knew (and the person holding the train tickets) in a country where he doesn’t speak the language wasn’t the smartest move. He had forgotten he wasn’t in Milan anymore and got into some verbal altercations in Italian. I’m not amused, needless to say. He wants to go clubbing. Absolutely not, we’re getting our tickets changed to the 3:30 train (apparently there was an earlier train home!), and that is the most intelligent 25 euros I’ve spent in my life.

Advice on Oktoberfest:

• I know it’s tempting, but really, you can’t get drunk. Drink slowly, get to your happy tipsy state, and stay there.
• On that note, make sure no one in your group gets drunk either.
• If you’re female, make sure you travel with guys. You will need someone to pose as your boyfriend. Trust me.
• Have a meeting spot.
• Charge your $@$%@$% phone. And even if you don’t hear your phone go off, if you’re separated, check it every few minutes.