Yesterday, on the evening before the Day of the German Unity, Moritz and I met after work for a nice stroll over the Wasen ( I had a cold so we did not plan on going into a beer tent).

The beer festival Stuttgart takes place each year for three weeks, starting in late September and lasting until the middle of October. Its origins date back to 1818.  Today, the Wasen is the second largest beer festival after the Oktoberfest in Munich.

You can find many fun rides and each year a few new ones are amongst them. I for example have never noticed this Egyptian ride called “Valley of the Kings”…

…where I met this nice feller. We seem to have the same style…

Other attractions seem to have been there for ever, like this ghost train:

… which is apparently “pleasant for the young and the old”…

As I really wanted to do a fun ride – and as a “pleasant” ghost train sounds like the thing made for us – I dragged Moritz into a car.

Oh, it was soooo scary… 😉

Of course, there are big wheels as well on the Wasen. This one from Kipp I found particularly pretty.

And of course there are a lot of beer tents, too…

The last picture inside the beer tent was taken at an early hour. Later, you will find everybody dancing on the tables!

The main reason, Moritz and I came to the Wasen, was the food. We went to an area where everything looked very Bavarian and had Kaiserschmarrn (pieces of pancake) and Germknödel (yeast dumpling). Veeeery nice! 🙂

And right there, Moritz found a friend, too!

Don’t they look nice together? 😉

As we didn’t want to go into a beer tent, we went back home when it started to get dark. I can really say, not only the ghost train ride was pleasant, the whole afternoon at the Wasen was! 🙂

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Cannstatter Wasen 2012

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The Oktoberfest is the best known German festival, I think. Some people also call it the “Beer Festival”. And that really nails it! 🙂 There are huge pavillions called beer tents (Bierzelte) where they play live musik and serve beer in huge glasses called Maß. It takes place each year for 16 days in September and Oktober in Munich on the Theresienwiese.

On Saturday, I drove from Stuttgart to Munich, which takes about 2.5 hours. I arrived in the afternoon and Cathy and I started to get dressed for an exciting evening at the Oktoberfest. We both wore Dirndl, a traditional dress from the south of Germany. Unfortunately, when we stepped outside, it was pouring with rain. But hey, Oktoberfest is only once a year so we decided to go nevertheless – maybe it will get better soon, we thought. Well, how wrong we were. When we arrived at the Theresienwiese, it was not only pouring, the wind was blowing very hard and it was freezing cold.

We walked over the Oktoberfest, had a Burger with Schweinshaxe and got really soaked within one hour – so we decided to be wimps and call it a day.

If you wonder now, why on earth we did not go into a beer tent, where it should be warm and dry and amazing – well, if you have no reservation, you need to show up around 7 am on the weekend to get the chance to go inside at all. And as we arrived at the festival around 4 pm that was no option.

Back home, we blow-dried our hair, Dirndl and cold feet and had several cups of hot tea. As we don’t see each other that often, we were just as happy, spending the early evening at Cathy’s place and chatting. Around 9 pm, we decided to go out for a drink. Cathy knows a very good cocktail bar called reizbar where they serve – direct quote from Cathy: “Munichs best cocktails”. That sounded good to me! 🙂

The reizbar turned out to be a very small bar with a very large cocktail menu. A lot of their drinks got awarded, too, so I was very excited. We started reading the first ten or so pages of the menu when the barceeper came to our table and asked whether we needed help. Well, we did and he recommended us two cocktails: “Mint-Peach-Daquiry” for Cathy and “Lustgewinn” for me.

They tasted amazing so we had to get another round. By seeing how well he did with his first recommendation, our barceeper got a little lightheaded and promised we would love the next two cocktails even more, they contain flowers and cucumber. So he placed “Red Cucumber” infront of me and “Vorstadtveilchen” (which translates into “Suburb Viola”)  in front of Cathy. Surprisingly, we liked those ones as well – even though I told Cathy at the begining of our evening how unpleasent I find vegetables in my drink…

It was still raining when we left the bar but just before we arrived at Cathy’s place, it stopped. Well, it was after 11 pm, which means, the Oktoberfest was closed now anyway. So we could fall into our beds without regret 😉

PS: In order to give you an idea, how nice it can be on the Oktoberfest when it’s not raining cats and dogs, here is a picture of the beer festival by sunshine…

More information about…

the Oktoberfest 2012

the reizbar

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