Prior
BAM! posts:
Well
that was a hell of a halftime beer. Now
where was I? Oh yes, Amsterdam. We woke up Wednesday morning in Amsterdam
feeling virile, or at least I did anyway.
Our flight to Munich was in the late morning, so we all headed to the
airport via train. Chandler left us to
go to Switzerland for a wedding, as he's apt to do. The remaining five of us –- Bonham, Daniel,
Gregerson, Colleen, and I –- enjoyed the short flight to Munich on a European budget
airline.
Ahh
Munich. It felt great to be back. As with Oktoberfest trips past, we stayed at
the Pension Siebel, which is close to Marienplatz (the city center), the Hofbräuhaus,
and the Viktualienmarkt (the city's giant open-air market). Walking to the hotel from the subway, we
noticed that the Lotter Leben –- a popular late-night bar for us in 2007 and 2010
because it is only about a block from the hotel -– was no longer there. It was a frightening development because we
did not know where we would be able to go for a late night beer and also see a
flamingly gay German server dance on top of the tables instead of bringing us
beer. But alas, as long as the Mall
of America was still around, we would be fine.
Bonham,
Daniel, and I shared a room. Upon our
arrival, we made sure to stretch because over the next four days, we knew we
were going to put our bodies through the kind of gauntlet of beer and sausage that
a non-Bavarian can only handle once every three years.
Once
we were loose, we decided to walk around the city, since Colleen had never been
to Munich. And walk we did. According to Daniel's fancy fitness bracelet,
we walked over 27,000 steps that day, which is a little more than a
half-marathon.
The
first stop was the Englischer Garten, a public park in Munich larger than
Central Park. I had not been to the
Englischer Garten since 2001. On the
prior two Oktoberfest trips in 2007 and 2010, everyone went to the Englischer
Garten on the day we arrived, while I was stuck waiting back around the hotel
for the remainder of our crew to arrive.
This time, that wasn't a problem, since there were only five of us and we all arrived on the same flight.
The
Englischer Garten is not only gigantic and gorgeous, but it is also home to
various rivers, creeks, and ponds. Within
the Englischer Garten, there are bier gartens, restaurants, and, a nude-optional
part of the park that always catches you by surprise, unless, of course, you
are used to turning a corner to see a group of 60-year-old naked German men
standing in a circle playing hacky sack.
Our
first stop in the Englischer Garten was at the giant Chinese pagoda that also
doubles as a restaurant and bier garten, complete with a traditional German
oompa band.
Knowing
that we were coming, Hofbräu sent its horse-drawn cart of beer barrels, which
made us feel quite welcome.
To
celebrate, we grabbed our first liter of beer on this trip. I enjoyed a liter of the Hofbräu weissbier, as
I'm wont to do.
After
downing our respective liters, we walked a little further down the path to
another bier garten that sits right next to a big pond.
Walking
makes a man thirsty, so we each grabbed another liter of beer. This bier garten had Paulaner dunkel on tap,
which meant that I enjoyed my first liter of dunkel of the trip. In the words of a blogger who likes a good
pun, don't mind if I dunkel. Things got
intense, as Daniel realized he was surrounded by ducks and swans on the pond –-
literally his worst nightmare. We made
sure he sat farthest from the water at the table, although not even that calmed
him down. His anxiety was palpable.
We
chugged our beers because Daniel started to have a panic attack as the ducks
inched closer and closer to shore.
Thankfully we got out of there before "those demon waterfowl killed
us all," in Daniel's words. We
sprinted to the subway station, trying to keep up with Daniel.
Anytime
I go to Munich, I make it a point to go to the Hofbräuhaus the first day I am
in town. It is easily one of my top five
happiest places on Earth to be. After
our near-death experience at the Englischer Garten, we all needed to
decompress.
Fearing
the onset of sobriety, we ordered more liters of beer. I went with the Hofbräu dunkel, as it is one
of my favorite beers in the world, especially when it's fresh from the tap at
its own haus.
The
beer and some dinner helped calm us down.
At the table next to us, a toddler, who appeared to be of gypsy blood,
performed what appeared on the surface to be an adorable version of Naughty by
Nature's "Hip Hop Hooray."
When
I realized she wasn't dancing innocently, but instead trying to steal my soul
with her gypsy eyes, I suggested to the group that we avoid eye contact (lest we want to turn to stone), pay our bill, and leave,
but that we do it just as we regularly would, so as not to raise
suspicion. We did just that and left the
Hofbräuhaus with our souls intact.
But
we were still thirsty. Thankfully, there
are other places in Munich that serve beer, so we went to my second-favorite
beer hall in Munich, the Augustiner –- the very same place where my
friend Jer went on a highly memorable anti-Swiss rant in 2007, eventually
resulting in him destroying his Swiss Army watch later that night.
Upon
our arrival, we went straight to the little outdoor area in the back, and I
ordered the only thing that would help get that pint-sized gypsy out of my
mind: a liter of dunkel. We were so excited to have once again escaped
a sticky situation that we took a bierhalle selfie.
In
the bathroom at the Augustiner, I finally figured what Jan-Michael Vincent has
been up to for the last 28 years: running
a successful hand dryer company in Germany.
The
Augustiner fortified our sense of resolve, so after our respective liters of
beer there, we decided to head to the Mall of America –- an actual mall by day
and a bar and dance club by night whose real name I have never known, but which
served us well in both 2007 and 2010, and particularly in 2010, when
Shane rubbed his hands in broken glass on the dance floor. You can imagine our horror when we arrived at
the Mall of America to see not flashing lights and drunk Germans, but instead
an actual mall that was closed for the evening.
Was the Mall of America a figment of our imaginations? Had it all been a dream in 2007 and 2010? We were so confused, but just in case, we
walked around both sides of the Mall of America, and our worst fears were
confirmed: if it had been a late night
Bavarian discotheque, it wasn't anymore.
Dejected,
we walked back towards Marienplatz to Tal, which is a pretty busy street with a
lot of bars. We found a bar there that
was open late. It had an "HB"
on its sign and beer steins, but it wasn't Hofbräu and it wasn't related to the
Hofbräuhaus. I could spell it out for
you, but that would involve me attempting to pronounce it in my mind, which I'm
not willing to try to do. Here's a
picture of a stein in case you want to give it a whirl:
I
wanted to set a personal record, so I ordered a liter of my fourth different
kind of dunkel in one day, and I gotta be honest, I felt pretty good about
it. We sat at some tables on the
sidewalk in front of the bar, when I got a text from my wife asking "Do
you want to know what we're having?" with no context. Assuming she was referring to what they were
eating for dinner and that she was eating an Italian beef sandwich at my
favorite restaurant in the suburbs, I responded "Paul's?" I realized she was not referring to food (or
hopefully wasn't) when she responded, "No, a boy." So that's when I found out the fetus that
would one day become Son was a boy, and I'll never forget where I was when I
got the news, even if I have no idea how to pronounce the name of the bar.
Obviously,
we were in a celebratory mood, so we kept drinking. The sidewalk seating closed at some point, so
we had to go inside. It was then that I
took a panoramic picture of the bar because it had a really cool white
porcelain mounting that housed all of the taps.
Colleen happened to be sitting to my right when I took the picture. Panoramic pictures can yield hilarious
results, especially when the people in the shots move. Colleen moved.
Somewhere,
Eric Stoltz is crying.
Tomorrow: affordable lederhosen, beer tents, a drunk
Swiss man and his dominatrix, and the traditional riding of statuary lions.
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