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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