Hacker Festzelt

There were two beers I was looking for in Munich.  One was Paulaner, and here was the flagship beer tent of the other, Hacker Pschorr.  I believe Hacker Pschorr owns Paulaner though, but after enough beer, no one really cares.

Here was the entertainment in the beer tent.  These guys are the best drinking song musicians in the entire world.  That's what ran through my head after the first two liters of beer.

Check this out.  The beer tent is designed so you can't tell whether you're inside or outside.  In fact, I see both a blue, cloudy sky, and the night stars, so you don't know the time of day either.  Then again, after the first few beers, pink polka dots would work too.  Note that the one in the lower right is not a Bavarian, because I'm sure they could care less about the Chicago Cubs.

I love this picture.  This pretty much encapsulates how Leigh and I felt throughout most of the trip.  We sit at a table with considerably older people.  None of them could speak English.  They didn't know this at first, but after a while, it didn't matter.  We communicated in the language of beer.  It was beautiful.  And these are Bavarians, so they had a thing or two to teach us.  First off, they called me a fool for drinking too fast.  You'll see how things turned out later in this page.  But anyway, they showed us the Bavarian ritual of toasting.  One guy raises his mug, and then everyone else at the table, no matter age, gender, or size, raises their mugs and toasts everyone else.  After that, you bang your mug down on the table, and then take a drink.  I eventually abused our friends here, and had them performing this ritual every 30 seconds for a good hour.  It makes a good drinking game.  Here's a video of Leigh getting along with our Bavarian friends.  And here's another video of the same thing, except with a drunken Plato rambling in the background about Leigh being his girlfriend.

Here's some wonderful food we had at the beer tent.  The top is something Leigh fell in love with.  It's a thick n' creamy mushroom onion soup poured over a massive dumpling.  That dumpling is almost like a matzah ball, except it's denser, and both its texture and taste is different.

Here's another picture of the crowd in the tent.  You see a few people standing up, and that guy in the back is shouting something.  People shouted things around the tent once in a while, often related to European soccer and rugby teams.

Here's the bastard himself, our friend Plato.  You'll see why I think of him as a scoundrel in later pictures, but he was very helpful.  Plato, pronounced "plah-toe", was born n' raised in Munich.  He's 100% Bavarian.  He speaks very good English and helped us translate what our German tablemates were saying, plus what was on the menu.

Here's a picture of Leigh taking pictures.  She has a wonderful smile here.  See the bottom of the picture to see why.

Here is me smiling, because of the beer, of course.  Notice how cool my hat looks, along with the authentic Bavarian feather.

Now things are getting interesting.  Leigh sits down at a neighboring table.  I tend to think she knew someone was already sitting there.

Here's Leigh wanting no part of other women.  We get it.

I, however, am a different story.

People compared how much beer they drank pretty often.  Beer volume dynamics is a science studied throughout Bavaria, or at least throughout Oktoberfest.

Leigh and the one occupying her seat are eyed jealously by the evil Plato.

These chocolate hearts, as you can see held by the guy in this picture, were passed around often in the festival, showing adoration between both friends and strangers.  One of the Germans we sat next to gave a big chocolate heart to Leigh, and she was touched.  So I picked up a heart for her to give back, but.. I ended up getting one much smaller without realizing it.  Oops.  I chose the one I bought because it had the cutest little stuffed puppy attached to it.

Look at the new hat Plato just got.  Looks good on him, doesn't it?  Obviously, he thought so.  It's a nice picture though.  I like the nervous expression of that girl behind Leigh.

Alright, this is the first of four.  Four what, you may ask?  Four pictures that I do not remember taking.  The story from Leigh was that people got up on tables and started dancing.  Looks like fun.  I can't tell you much more about this...

...or this.  That girl on the left is cute though.

I know what's going on here quite well.  It's that thing frat boys do when one of their buddies flops over drunk.  I'm being mocked.  I don't appreciate this one bit.  No one stepped on my camera though, and for that, I am grateful.

I think this is the last picture taken by your hero before it was time for a nap.  I won't discuss too much of what happened later.  We did meet up with a soccer team from Amsterdam later, back at Marienplatz.  We saw them mocking another team in the beer tent, so it was fun to chat with them.  They tried to convince me to go to Amsterdam, saying it was a fun party town, and had more than an infamous red light district.

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