Amidst countless al-Qaeda threats, faulty electronic plane tickets and having to confront my fear of small airplanes (and doing so with enormous amounts of cheap red wine), I not only made it to Oktoberfest (technically Cannstatter Volksfest) in Stuttgart, Germany, but oh my goodness did I have an epic time...
So, in my defense, I'm not actually a wine-o in real life. However, I have a big fear of flying and after walking the tarmac and laying my eyes on what barely even looked like a plane because of it's ridiculously small size, I of course wasn't going to pass up free refills of red wine onboard. It was a great idea and it definitely helped, unfortunately it took a good hour and a half for the other 2 glasses of wine to kick in... and the flight was only an hour and 10 minutes long.
That being said, I got off the plane alone, knowing no more than 5 words in the German language, mapless and.. oh yeah... drunk off Lufthsana's red wine. What should have taken me no more than an hour to get from the airport to our hostel took me about two hours.. and my phone took forever to pick up a signal, so needless to say when I had arrived at our (ADORABLE) hostel, I had missed everyone who had left for dinner. Nevertheless, it was a long, dull three hours in the hostel room until Chris and Steve finally arrived. Words can't express how much I've missed Chris and how happy I was to not only see him again but also to see him in GERMANY, but I had been so worn out and cranky from being alone (and hungover at 7pm) that I'm not sure he realized it until later..
That being said, despite the fact that we really did nothing but get lost and search for a restaurant for several hours that night, it was hilarious and it was so awesome to just wander around a random town in a country completely foreign to all of us. We got back, passed out for the night and woke up to a beautiful, sunny, charming Stuttgart..
So we spent our Saturday at Ludwigsburg at the Bluhendes Barock... I'm still not entirely sure what exactly that place is because none of us could understand the signs (nothing was written in English)... but the gardens were beautiful and OH MY GOODNESS the pumpkins were awesome... It reminded me of family trips to the October festivals in Pennsylvania. My mom would've been all over this place (hahaa). Not to mention had I been 10 years younger I would've loved all of the fairy tale castles and displays that they had...so awesome!
So for lunch we went to this place where everything they served incorporated pumpkins.. I had spaghetti with pumpkin sauce, Chris had some pumpkin rice dish and the others had pumpkin quiches and raviolis. SOO delicious. The beer was fabulous as well.. the awesome thing was that we bumped into quite a few Americans who were in town for military purposes... two of the peope we had spoken to on separate occasions had said that they felt that this year, the Cannstatter Volksfest was actually better than Oktoberfest in Munich had been... I have no grounds to make that statement since I've never even been to Munich, but I can't imagine how Oktoberfest could have been much better (or even much bigger?).
So, we all (of course) came back to the hostel to nap before our festivities that night... We made our way back to Bad Canstatt afterwards and OH MY GOODNESS. First off, they had amusement rides that I've never even seen before.. there were so many incredible food stands and beer EVERYWHERE. Honestly, where else are there festivals that have rollercoasters with loops in them and several ferris wheels?? I would've loved to have done a few rounds of rides, but we somehow managed to wedge our way into a beer tent that was in extremey high demand. Oh my goodness.. no words or pictures could describe how insane it was inside. It was only about 7:30pm and people were already dancing on tables and passing liters of beers and diving into huge platefuls of pork and fries (yes, they're fries again in the EU) and AHHH... so much craziness. How anyone could be a server during Oktoberfest, I have no idea. Definitely requires a lot of skill, alot of patience and a lot of energy...
We finally found a reserved table that no one was occupying and plopped ourselves down and ordered a few rounds of beer and DELICIOUS chicken. SO GOOD. It wasn't long before we made a few German friends without understanding much of what they were saying.. there was also a live band playing German drinking songs, but what I don't understand was... why on several occasions did they play "YMCA" and Robbie Williams' "Angels"??? SO weird!
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