Oktoberfest
It all started almost 200 years ago with a nice quiet little Royal wedding. King Maximillian of Bavaria gave a reception to celebrate the wedding of his son, Prince Ludwig to Princess Therese. The happy day was such a success Maximillian thought he should repeat it every year. And so the Munich Oktoberfest was born.
Today it has become the world’s biggest public festival – attended last year by an astonishing seven million visitors. In 2008, it will be the 175th festival. The enormous annual knees-up runs from the last week of September to the first week of October.
Back in Ludwig’s day Munich’s citizens were invited to the fields just outside the city gates. Those fields soon became called Theresienwiese ("Theresa's fields") in honour of the Crown Princess. Locals abbreviated the name to the "Wies'n". And that’s what they still call the whole event.
But Ludwig would be amazed to see how today’s ‘Wies’n’ has evolved from his humble wedding bash. The Theresienwiese site is now close to Munich’s city centre and that’s where this year’s revellers will consume an estimated four million pork sausages, 600,000 grilled chickens and 94 whole roasted oxen. And most importantly, they will drown more than 6,000,000 litres of beer. And that’s what makes the Oktoberfest special.
Okay, there are folklore displays, open-air concerts and colourful parades. There are historical costumes, traditional dances and ancient craft demonstrations. There are special reduced price ‘Family Days’ and facilities for pensioners. The huge 100-acre Oktoberfest grounds provide carousels, roller coasters and fairground stalls for visitors of all ages. Non-alcoholic beer and soft drinks are even available. The funfair has pony rides, merry-go-rounds, Punch and Judy shows and dodgems. But children are not allowed in the tents in the evening – nothing must come between a Festival goer and his beer.
Yet back in the nineteenth century the festival had some horse races and an agricultural show. Entertainment was sparse among the thoroughbreds and prize cabbages. The first carousel and two swings were set up in 1818. Visitors were only able to quench their thirst at a few small beer stands. Not until 1896 were these stands replaced by the larger beer tents set up by some enterprising local landlords with the backing of the breweries.
Now the Festival is more like a homage to beer than a wedding celebration. It all begins on the first Saturday with the “Grand Entry of the Oktoberfest Landlords and Breweries”. This 45 minute procession is the official prelude to the opening of the Festival and involves about 1,000 participants, including the landlords' families in decorated carriages, magnificent horse-drawn drays of the Munich breweries, waitresses on decorated floats and all the beer tent bands playing their best oompa-oompa marching numbers.
At the end of the parade, the Mayor of Munich enters one of the huge beer tents set up by the breweries. ‘Tent’ is a slight understatement, as some of these ‘tents’ seat an extraordinary 10,000 drinkers. To start this annual drinkathon a cannon is fired twelve times and then Mayor taps the first keg, fills his glass with beer and says to the crowd “Ozapft is!” (or ‘the keg is tapped’).
Then things start to go crazy. The beer-fuelled atmosphere at Tereseinwiese soon becomes surreal. There’s no place to hide when you find yourself sitting among ten thousand thigh slapping Bavarians singing along to the Village People’s 'YMCA' while doing dance movements choreographed by a band leader who wears a red Noddy hat with silver bells hanging from its fringe.
The brass bands add to the atmosphere with non-stop drinking songs and many people link arms, singing and swaying. Someone always ends up dancing on the table, hardly surprising when you learn that the breweries make a special strong beer for Oktoberfest called Wiesenbier (meadow beer). Contests are held to see which of the waitresses can carry the most full one-litre beer mugs. One waitress once carried 21 at once. There are also beer drinking contests and sausage eating competitions. With 100,000 seated drinkers to feed Gebratene Ochsen (roasted oxen), Haehnchen (rotisserie chicken), Steckerlfisch (fish on a stick) and Bratwurst sausages are eaten in huge quantities.
The pre-booze-up crowds are entertained on the second day of Oktoberfest with a parade of 7,000 traditional costumes. Most of the German men take the opportunity to wear their Lederhosen - leather shorts usually worn with braces, white shirts and knee-high stockings while the women dress in flowery folk dresses. This whole colourful but eccentric parade stretches for five miles through the city. Trees and lampposts are decorated. By-standers cheer. And where does the procession end up? Back at the beer tents of course – and just in time for everyone to start drinking again.
This year's Oktoberfest takes place from September 20 until October 5.
Useful links
Munich\'s official internet site
Added 2008/05/16 @ 23:44:20
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