September 28th (Part 2)
September 28th, 2006 at 10:36am
| A quick shower and on the train to Oktoberfest. The scale of it is hard to imagine its huge there are over half a million people (that’s 2 times Geelong) each day. |
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| The area is about a km square and full of some of the wildest and largest amusement rides. Some are Disney scale and portable. There’s heaps of food stalls and novelty stalls even a flea circus and of course the beer halls. |
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| The beer halls were these elaborate marquees some 100 metres or more in length and width. They are all decorated and are jammed packed with trestles benches and seats with up to 6000 people enjoying the beer, roasts and German ompaloompa bands. All the halls serve beer in one size – in huge heavy 1 litre glass mugs. They all serve a tasty Bavarian Fare including sausages, snitchells, pork knuckle and giant pretzels. For those who don’t like pork they cater for aqua-tairans with one hall serving lovely smoked herring- you could smell them a mile off. |
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| There were about 10 huge tents and another 10 smaller ones but it was all but impossible to get a beer as you needed a seat and most of the afternoon and evening seats were booked 6 to 12 months ago. |
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The beer halls were amazing structures it’s hard to imagine how much work has gone into constructing and fitting them out for just 14 days of Oktoberfest. The beergarten we visited in the photo below had gas heating, copper spouting, plants and lighting, real glass doors and windows. It was like a permanent structure. And the rides were enormous some would have taken 10 – 20 semi trailers to cart them away and weeks to build. |
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| We eventually found a seat at a beirgarten next to one of the smaller tents and sampled a few brews.
we then went for a walk and found what was probably the only bar that didn’t have seating and had quite a few more beer finding some new German and a young bloke from Wisconsin in the US who were a bit of fun. it ended up a fun night. There was very few drunks as everyone was having too much fun. There was this one girl who we saw exploding beer from both ends at once. she must have coped a bad sausage or pork knuckle.
a good percentage of the crowd are dressed up in their national dress lederhosen felt hats and the girls with long dresses with aprons
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