Monday, September 08, 2014

BAM!: Munich Day 1 (Wednesday)

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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