Oktoberfest Munich

So on Saturday, September 27th, we headed to the biggest and oldest Oktoberfest in Germany, Munich.  It is also the largest festival in the world.  We had been planning on coming for over 9 months because if you don't there is no way you will find a place to stay.

 

Here we are trying to figure out the best route into the city by train.  There was no way we wanted to drive in there because there would have been no parking.  Before we head into the festivities a little history.  On October 12, 1810 Crown Prince Ludwig married the Princess  of Teresa of Sassonia-Hildburghausen.  All the citizens of Munich were invited to attend the celebration held in the fields in front of the city gate to celebrate the happy royal event.  The closing ceremony at the party included a horse race, a veritable feast for the whole of Bavaria, the following year the decision to repeat the horse races gave rise to the origin of the Oktoberfest tradition.  In 1960 the horse races were stopped and the big fair you see today.

 

We decided once we got to Munich to follow the crowd and we were probably going in the right direction.

 

Though the signs do help and Steve was helpful enough to point it out!!

 

Headed up the escalator to enter the Oktoberfest!

 

Look, they even have a wonderful sign for us! 

 

 

So this is the crowd when we showed up at 10 am.  You can still see some holes, etc.

 

David and I in front of the Paulaner tent.  These big beer tents weren't started until 1896, due to an initiative by the hosts in collaboration with the brewers.  In 1913, the Braurosl was built, the largest tent with 12,000 seats.  In 1910 a record 120,000 liters of beer was sold, now over six million liters of beer are sold every year.

 

This is the crowd that kept coming and coming and coming.  I had to wait till 11 before I could go into the tent because they didn't allow backpacks.  So I was able to see all of the people streaming in.

 

AJ was amazed by the size of the beer that it was the size of his head!!!

 

David with his first beer in the Pulaner tent!  He is so handsome!!!

 

They had two layers of seating in this tent!

 

The boys were able to have 1/2 liters of pop.  They all thought it was so cool!!!  I think the biggest pop they have ever had!

 

 

I finally made it into the tent!!!  YEAH!

 

If you stood up on the chairs you had to chug whatever was left in your beer.  This guy had a full one when he started to chug and was able to chug the whole thing!  If you don't, you get booed and things thrown at you.

 

The girls!!  I was the only one who didn't like beer, but had to pose with one.  :-)

 

The boys!!!  They were having so much fun together!!!

 

 My boys!!!  I love them all!!!!

 

This is how they carry the liters of beer.  It is truly amazing how many beers they can carry at once.  This wasn't even the most that we saw!

 

And there are all sorts at these festivals.  This guy stuck his face on the window and stayed there until AJ took his picture.

 

The crew in the tent!!!

 

As you were walking out of the tent you saw this huge pig!  Each tent has different beers, serves different food and different decoration and bands.  After about three hours in the tent our children were thoroughly bored, so we decided to head out and let them do some rides.

 

Most of the kids didn't want to do the same ride, so there was a bit of standing and waiting, but the kids did have a great time.  Here are AJ and Jack riding a roller coaster.

 

Jack, AJ and Michael on a spinning top.  They all said they loved it!

 

Next up the swings, AJ, Michael and Nate rode this one.  You can see AJ's orange shirt and Michael and Nate are in front of him.  As you can see it goes up really, really high.

 

AJ and Michael wanted to try on different Oktoberfest hats - they look so cute!

 

They each were able to play one game.  They both choose a shooting game.  AJ hit eight out of ten shots.

 

Michael hit six out of ten.  They both did a great job!!!

 

And for that Michael won some vampire teeth.

 

My boys decided they needed hats like Jack and Joey.  The four boys looking good!!!!

 

We did the conga line through the crowds to try and stay together!!

 

There were many out there trying to make some money.  He was pretty good.

 

We headed out around 5:30 pm and there were still crowds coming in.  They did not stop coming the whole day.

 

Truly amazing how many people came, they say about 6.3 million guests during the Oktoberfest.  They said about 112 oxen, 48 calves and 6.4 million liters of beer were consumed in 2014.  Tent security stopped a dazzling 112,000 people from taking their mug home with them.

 

A view from our apartment after we arrived home.  It was a great day and we were all exhausted on the train ride home.  We wanted to experience the oldest Oktoberfest and we did.  It was fun, but the box is now checked and am ready for the next adventure!

Olympic Stadium Munich

On Friday September 26th, we headed off to Munich for Oktoberfest.  We decided to do some sightseeing of course along with that.  We were meeting two other families there for the weekend.  It was quite amazing, we started from two different cities and we ended up at the same parking garage (there are many at each place in Germany) within about 3 minutes of each other.  We couldn't have planned it any better!!!  We decided to check out the Olympic Stadium first.

 

So Michael decided to be our tour guide, though I am not sure which way we are supposed to go.  :-)

 
 

 

Before our tour of the stadium we decided to stop for some lunch.  Our goofy boys back together again!

 

And the "grownups" having their lunch.  It was a beautiful view!!!

 

Then we hopped on a train and since there were 11 of us we had a personal tour guide.  This looks back over the lake at the stadium and the Olympic Tower.   Of the Olympic Park, over 2/3rds of it is built underground.  They also planted over 1000 trees.  They wanted to build the stadium so it could be used after the Olympics.  Most of the Olympic stadiums are never used again.  So they designed the main part of the stadium to specifics to the two soccer teams in the area.

 

Since we took the tour we were able to go in the VIP entrance.

 

This was our tour guide, she was really, really awesome and so cute!

 

Going into the VIP lounge you didn't really get the VIP feeling as much at other places.  They did that on purpose because they wanted to make the sport the middle of interest and not the VIPs.  David is checking out the ceiling, they are all plastic, you can tell that it was built in the late 60s and early 70s.   After the Olympics, the stadium had soccer games for 30 years in it.  They had to have red on Saturdays and then change everything out for the Sunday game to blue.  They also had to change all the signs, the beer kegs, etc to match the local team that was playing.  It took a lot of work to do that almost every weekend.

 

I think this was the kids favorite part!!!  Check out how HUGE this foosball table is!!!  It is so crazy!!!  What was really cool, after the tour guide explained everything around the room to us, she jumped in and played with the boys!

 

David standing next to a replica of one of the world cup trophies!

 

They did a lot of firsts at this Olympic Games in 1972, one of them was to have pictograms all around the stadium.  Since there were going to be so many languages, they thought pictures would be a better idea than trying to translate everything.

 

They also introduced the first ever Olympic mascot.  This is Waldi, the 1972 mascot of the Olympics.

 

They also had many torches from different Olympics.  They have more than one torch in the  Olympic torch run.  They usually have about three at all times lit with the Olympic fire just in case one goes out they don't have to go all the way back to the beginning to get the fire.  That also makes it so more places have original torches to display.  They had some from the Atlantic games, their games in 72 and 36 and a few others.  Pretty cool.

 

This was the one from Atlanta.

 

This is the one from the 1936  Olympics.   So when they were planning this Olympics they wanted to do everything as opposite as the 1936 Olympics as possible.  They wanted it bright, cheery open to everybody.  The colors for the 1936 Olympics were red, black and brown.  They did rainbow colors for this Olympics, but they left out the red because it was in the '36 Olympics.

 

After that we headed outside to check out the stadium a bit and Michael decided to give our tour guide a heart attack and sit on the edge with her.  :-)  You can tell she doesn't have any children of her own!

 

The soccer stadium and track. You can see the Olympic Tower in the background.  Another thing they really wanted to show was that everything was green and close together. 

 

This is where the stand for the Olympic flame!  What is interesting is that the torch run started in the 1936 Olympics.  It was supposed to prepare people for peaceful games.

 

 

Next we headed to the locker rooms.  The boys found the "cold" pool.  They thought maybe it was a hot tub at first, but found out it is where the athletes go after the game to soak in cold water for their muscles, injuries, etc.

 

Here you can see the showers, they put in 10 showers because there were 10 soccer players.  Again trying to make it usable after the Olympic games.

 

David doesn't seem to be having a good conversation with this soccer player.  :-)

 

Michael found the hair dryer and is enjoying some warmth.

 

We were able to go down onto the field, she even played the Olympic music for us as we came out where the players and athletes came out.  It was kind of cool!  Michael and Joey took off running around the track as soon as they step foot on the track.

 

 

 

She brought out a soccer ball for the kids to try and get it through the hole.

 

Michael's turn.  They did try, but none of them got it in the holes.

 

Here we are with the Olympic Tower behind us!

 

AJ heading across the field to climb up all those stairs, Michael is in front of him on the left.

 

And up the four kids go!!!  We told them they couldn't run the whole thing and they tried to prove us wrong.  It was great!

 

The roof is very interesting.  Here you can see it better.  It is all one roof top, connected throughout the whole stadium.  It was the biggest roof top in the world at the time, but not anymore.  It is still the longest roof.  She told us the construction workers that were building the roof would do races across them before the plastic was put on and raced for beer.  It is basically a big net of steel and then plastic on top.  It can adjust when there is snow on top of it and bend.  There is never any need of shoveling the snow off, the roof just has a different shape for awhile.  The pylons that hold it up are also flexible.  If one of those falls down, the whole roof wouldn't come down, again it would just change shape.

 

This is the Olympic swimming pool as you might have guessed.  You can see the glass on the left of the picture.  It wasn't there during the Olympics so they could add more seats.  When the Olympics were over they added the glass walls.  These glass walls are all over the place.  This is part of the illusion they wanted to set with no walls or borders.  There is glass from top to bottom of all the buildings so even if you didn't have a ticket you could still see in and see what is going on.  There was another first in this pool, they had water overflowing the edge so there is no current against the swimmers.  Also the first time the water moves for the divers so they could figure out where the water was.  When it is still and they could see the bottom they had a hard time judging the distance.

 

These are the seats they first put in the Olympic Stadiums.  They did change the ones where they played soccer out so they had backs on them, but left these the originals.

 

 

These flowers were on the top of the roof.  They were two purposes, one to hold this to the roof top and the second was it helps with static electricity.

 

 

 

I thought this was cool, they take the snow off the roof, melt it and then pipe it into the Olympic lake.  The lake is strictly filled up with rain or snow water.

 

 

Outside they have many famous hand prints around the lake.  This one is the Undertake from WWE.

 

 

The boys couldn't believe how big his hands were.

 

Next we headed for the Olympic Tower.  It was started in 1965 and opened in 1968.  It is the tallest building in Munich measuring 291.28 m high, 955 feet.  It weighs over 40,000 tons.

 

The boys loved this photo of not throwing bottles over the edge.

 

From the top you could see the BMW museum and tower.  Also on a little clearer day you can see all the way to Garmisch and the Alps which is about an hour away.

 

This was the where all the competitors stayed.  Now they rent it out to families or college students.  They are told they can paint them any color they want and it is a very colorful apartment area.

 

Here you can get a good bird's eye view of the tent and the grounds.  Again they wanted to keep everything close and easy accessible.

 

 

This Olympic hill is made out of war debris.  It was higher before so that anybody could sit on it and then be able to see into the stadium.  They lowered it after the Olympics.  Also they did put any paths on the hill, the paths that you see now are from people just wandering up the hill.

 

 

David and I at the top of the tower!

 

This was the symbol created for the 1972 Olympics.

 

During the Olympics, they were trying to portray an open Germany, not much security and ended up having 11 athletes taken hostage in the tall building on the left.  Unfortunately none of the hostages survived, but they decided to continue with the  Olympics.

 

I thought this was really neat, a mirror piano played by Elton John in 1973.

 

So one really cool thing about this trip is that we had three people taking photos!!  It was great!

 

The end of a great day!!!  This was a view from our apartment a little ways out from Munich.  We all decided we needed a little bit of sleep before we headed to Oktoberfest the next day.