Well, how many times did we scream that last night. What a time we had. Way better than in Munich - always remember to come to Stuttgart for Oct Beer Fest because in Munich there are too many people, too many tourists and mostly Americans, and nothing is free.
We headed out to the fair grounds at 1:30 in the afternoon and walked around for a bit before the actual festivities begun. We wanted to get a handle on things before the crowds came. The grounds are always open but the beer tents and the rides etc. are not open until 3 on the first day and 11 for the rest of the 2 weeks.
We sat and had lunch at one of the beer tents on the midway and then headed out to search for our places to visit for the evening. We found gigantic beer halls, some of which hold 5000 people. Everything was already in the swing of preparing as they feed thousands of visitors in seconds of every order made.
We walked and walked and at exactly 3 it was almost like magic as the whole fairground was swarming with people. We made one last walk around to finish off our tour and then headed for a beer tent. Now all tents have reserved tables which you have to reserve on the computer but, here's the clincher, you can only book them if you have up to 10 people coming. Otherwise, you take your chances when you come that there will be some, very few mind you, empty seats in the unreserved sections which are always off to the side away from the stage. So by 4 when we walked into the first tent, the unreserved section was almost all full. We managed to squeeze into the end of a long table up against a wall. We put in our order to our table server and, boom, our beer and food were there in less than 1 min. Our table buddies were German and very sweet and we sang and swayed together for 4 hours. They kept wanting us to drink schnapps and bought us some bottles but we only feigned drinking them and then put them into our bag. We two weren't meant to drink so much. We ate the fest's roasted chicken, drank the 1litre glasses of beer and left the first tent happy and full.
Then we moved onto the next tent. We couldn't find a seat there so we had to go around asking people if we could join their table. Some people got irate with me for even asking but those kind of people are usually the ones who are snobs. Not to worry, I found a group of young male soccer players who were only too happy to have us join them in standing on the benches and singing and banging beer mugs together. We ate another plate of typical Fest food - dry ribs and another 1 ltr beer.
When G and I couldn't handle the cig smoke any longer, we headed home. When kids are 16 in this country, they are allowed to drink so there were loads of them, all dressed in German festival clothes and some of whom were way too tipsy, roaming everywhere even until after we left. Even some adults fell asleep at the tables due to too much alcohol and we were told that many people are found all over the fair grounds just sleeping off the night. G and I took the train back to town and arrived at the hotel tired and happy. G put me to bed- thank goodness someone takes care of me!!
