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Weg mit der Scheiße!
“Weg mit der Scheiße” is the first colloquial German toast we learned at Oktoberfest, along with “Prost ihre säcke, prost du sack”. You can imagine our excitement to learn some foreign cheers to bring to Blacksburg and impress everybody back home, and our dismay at the translation of the latter. The first is just “Away with the shit” followed by a clink and a drink. In the other one… the initiating dude raises a glass to his bros with an enthused “Cheers to y’alls balls!” to which his companions reply “CHEERS TO YOUR BALLS!” and everybody drinks to eachothers nuts… Sweet right?
I can offer a few words of advice for anyone that wants to make the pilgrimage to Munich for the festival:
- If you take the train, don’t reserve the 5:45am train. If you have no choice, make sure your alarm clock works. If it doesn’t, pick some friends that’ll ring your doorbell 30 times, walk in and beam some flashlights in your eyes until you wake up and get movin.
- Stay in The Tent, but be ready for the weather. It’s a big campground where people from all over the world set up tents and party after the real deal in the city center. We arrived and set up our tent about fifteen minutes before an overnight torrential downpour that dissipated to a regular cold-and-shitty rain in the morning - nothing some warm clothes, 5 dudes, a 3-man tent, and a bunch of can-do attitudes can’t fix, eh?
- Wake up EARLY! Don’t lose sleep partying with the Aussies, Zimbabweans, and Danes like we did. They’re cool, but not as cool as Oktoberfest beer tents. If you want to have a reasonable chance at getting into a tent without a reservation, you’ve gotta be there by 7:00am (how ridiculous is that??). You can risk it and wake up at 9:00am like us, but you better not be claustrophobic, you better be patient, and you better have a miracle worker like Kyle Wolf in your group.
People love their beer, and are prepared to pack it in like moms at the entrance to wal-mart on Black Friday. I’m talking about about 100 square feet (20ft wide by 50ft long) queue full of 200 or more people. We stood for two hours in such conditions, getting real friendly and involuntarily handsy with our neighbors. Kyle wiggled out of line to find another entrance, but it was just as mobbed, came back and befriended his way to a spot (get this) IN FRONT OF US. When the doorman called out for a party of “fünf”, Kyle was the first one of nearly 30 people to correctly pronounce the german while holding up five fingers. By the grace of god we got picked, peeled our hands off the girls’ butts in front of us, swam through the sea of people to the door, and rejoiced. - Enjoy it. Sing the songs, drool over the food, drink the beer, ride the rides, open your eyes… Dudes love Dirndl and ladies love Lederhosen. It’s like a horse race, (Foxfields, if you will) where everybody dresses to impress, only in the german version theres no race; preppy dresses = Dirndl (boob party), and bowties and pastels = Lederhosen (embroidered suspenders and funky hats).
The videos below are brought to you by Ben Bechtel. He was brave enough to bring his camera, and kind enough to share his footage. If it is unclear, the “before” shows us missing our 5:45am train, because Karl and I were soundly asleep, the “during” shows 6,900 in celebration at the Hofbräu-Festzelt, and the “after” just about sums it up. Thanks to Ben for his clever documentation.
