travel

Oktoberfest Sucks, 10/1

After the Free Tour, we decided that we ought to check out Oktoberfest, at least for one beer, since it was the last day and we were in Munich. We expected it to be crowded and kind of lame, maybe similar to taste of Chicago. We had no idea how much it would actually suck.

If you were on Family Feuds and the topic was “Problems with Oktoberfest,” you’d probably guess “filthy” and “vomit” and “broken glass.” You’d probably guess “crowded” and “expensive.” You might guess “drunken Italians beating on doors and making the rest of the people in line look like assholes by association.” You might guess “people fighting cops” or “people passed out at the train station” or “people not actually looking like they’re having a very good time.” The one thing that you would probably never, ever guess, is “can’t get a goddamn beer.”

Gemma and I walked around for about an hour, while people weaved around like zombies, trying to collide with us and looking dangerously close to puking. We got in a couple lines for beer tents, which moved nowhere, ever. We found lots of “exits only” and a couple lines for people with reservations, and one outdoor beer garden (it was raining) where we could get in, but couldn’t buy a beer directly from the counter, and couldn’t find a waitress with a geiger counter.

We made our way out of Oktoberfest as quickly as possible, given the crowds, passing three different teams of paramedics evacuating people, skipped the subway packed full of recent Oktoberfest goers who clearly had not had the same difficulty finding beers that Gemma and I had had, and walked in the rain for a long time until we got to a subway station that was relatively deserted.

All of this was at about 4 pm, by the way. So... no beer for Gemma and John at Oktoberfest. We have to be the only people ever to go to Oktoberfest and not be able to find beer. Instead we came home, went to a supermarket, ate dinner, and fell asleep.

Blackberries and the Internet, Devon, 9/25/05

We had a nice Sunday here in Devon. I read parts of the paper until everybody else was up, and we had a nice long breakfast of bread-- Chris’ bread and bread from a local bakery-- butter, margarine, honey, Chris’ jam, Marmite, melon, grapes, and dried apricots. We studied the train schedules and figured out which of our plans are possible and which are not. We wrote some emails, looked at photos of various small towns in northern Italy where it might be nice to go for Gemma’s birthday, read news (go White Sox!), looked around on Hospitality Club, looked at ferry schedules, and all sorts of other web nonsense that distracted us from the gorgeous sunny day outside.

Tom showed me a guide book for Greece. We’re thinking now that November might be largely devoted to Croatia, Greece, and Turkey. If Janusz gets back to us about the place in Krakow, then we might not have any time for Latvia, Lithuania, or Estonia, which would be very sad. Berlin has also been squeezed out, although I’m still hoping we’ll get there at least for a weekend from Krakow. It looks like we’ll be in St. Petersburg for New Year’s Eve, and for a few days afterward, and then we’ll have 3 weeks to explore Mongolia and China. Sigh... the world is so big, and we’re not even east of where we started yet. It was definitely worth waiting around in the UK for Tom and Chris to get back from their vacation, though. We’ve had a great time everywhere we’ve been, except for that second Megabus.

Tom and Chris went out in the afternoon to look at some green house. Gemma and I edited photos, wrote more emails, and changed our itinerary some. I found a little Italian language instruction book, and Gemma found some French lessons on the web, and we started trying to remember what we’d learned years ago. I think I’ve started to separate Italian from Spanish some by now, but I have almost no vocabulary. I still remember all the flavors of ice cream, though.

After a while, we decided to make ourselves useful by going to pick blackberries. Some of the hedges that separate Tom & Chris’ land from their neighbors’ are blackberry bushes, and we had eaten blackberries and yogurt and blackberry and apple pie. They seemed to find blackberry picking somewhat tedious, and said that any day now some guy would show up and clip back their hedges, and that would be it for blackberries this year. The ram lambs all came up to us curiously, wondering what we had brought them, when we crossed their land. They wouldn’t let Gemma pet them, though, and eventually went away. We picked a pint or more blackberries, and watched a fox move stealthily across the cattle’s field.

This Webpage. . .

. . will serve as the main place that John and I will share our experiences and photographs while traveling. Everything food related will, of course, be on my other webpage.