First off, I want to apologize for the last post, namely the poor grammar and likely typographic errors, as I was rushing to finish it up before making an early dash to bed. In order to get dinner Thursday night, my host family tricked me into going to a writer’s conference featuring books on Lyon and the Rhone valley region with, get this, the same group of people with whom I went on the Chateau tour! Fortunately, it was not nearly as long of an ordeal, once again my roommate and I were together in encouraging each other to stay strong, and there was fantastic French food at the end of the presentations. But, I had to rush home from that before the rest of my host family because I had to prepare for a 6 a.m. flight Friday morning to…Munich.
Munich, Germany, is the host every year of the world’s biggest carnival (as well as, unofficially, the largest group of inebriated American college kids outside of the States), known as Oktoberfest. Now, despite the name, you may be surprised to learn that this three week party begins the third Friday in September (this year the 18th) and ends the first Sunday in October, namely today. There were more than a dozen of us Lyonnais that made the trip, and we joined up with countless other Penn kids, college students from across the country/world, and even found a friend of mine from high school wandering about (Tom Simeone for my Potomac savvy readers, as you can probably imagine his 6-7 frame was easy to spot). For a self-described “festival of beer”, this crowd was to be expected, and I think I have seen my fair share of falling down, screaming, vomiting Americans for the duration of my trip. The alcohol was confined to six sanctioned “beer tents”, featuring one for each of the Munich breweries; sadly, these tents were full by 10am on Saturday (perhaps even worse, I was there to verify this fact). Stepping inside made me immediately wonder what world I had just entered, as these raucous, apparently temporary, structures were full of waitresses carrying 10 liters of beer at a time (1 glass = 1 liter) to tables filled to the brim with screaming, smoking, dancing people of all ages. Adding to the atmosphere was usually a house band whose basic job was to lead the mass of people in drinking songs. Pictures cannot do justice to the debauchery.
However, there was a complete other side to Oktoberfest that I was distinctly unprepared for; this was a family affair. Again, against the backdrop of your pretty standard beerfest (as I clearly am a connoisseur of these things), there were children being carried over parents shoulders, led around by the hand, or even pushed in strollers. Ah, German family life. I’m not exactly sure how to describe the emotion one feels when standing outside of a beer tent, unable to get past security because it is too full, when a mother comes out with two children attached to her hip. Later I realized that the organizers of this fest actually played up to this crowd; by having kiddie roller-coasters and other amusement park like attractions, who could leave the poor little ones at home? The dichotomy of the scene continued to strike me the entire weekend.
In addition to the wee ones, Oktoberfest is truly an international event. Throughout the course of the two days we spent at the festival, I met people from Australia, New Zealand, the Czech Republic, Spain, Puerto Rico, France, Italy, Austria, Germany (of course), England, and at least ten different states. Yet, despite all the different languages of the world present at the festival, English carried the day throughout the city. Waitresses in the beer tents kindly used it to ask for our money, vendors tried it to sell their products to us, and even in downtown Munich most restaurants had menus in English so we were absolutely sure what kind of Bavarian sausage we were ordering this time. Quick digression – not sure how Germans are not grotesquely obese, as all they do is eat bratwurst and French fries (or some other variant of meat and potatoes with sauerkraut on top), and down it with liter upon liter of beer.
But back to language, as it was pretty disastrous in terms of communication in German, as after the first day I could not say please, thank you, or excuse me in this host language. Thankfully everyone spoke English, as otherwise we had no chance of getting around. This fact brought about a profound realization in all of us: we are pretty good at French. Of course we all recognize how far we are from fluency in French, and there is still much progress to be made, but our struggles in German showed us how far along we are in French, even only a quarter of the way through the program. Upon hearing French again boarding this plane to Lyon, we were thrilled to, once again, understand a nearby conversation. Let the eavesdropping begin.
To be fair to the weekend, and to justify it beyond solely alcohol related matters, we spent the little time we had today before our flight actually walking around the rest of Munich and, albeit it minimally, appreciating the history of the city. We saw our fair share of historic churches, city squares, and McDonald’s, as well as the Munich version of the Champs Elysees, which was much less exciting than the original. Most of the squares and buildings in Munich were fairly large and imposing, but were also very empty, in the sense that open areas would just have one small statue, or the mini “Arc de Triomphe” would just have one little phrase etched into it, and the rest was blank. Still, it was fun to walk around and take in the sights of a town that is, at least for these 15 days, consumed by un-cultured Americans.
Now its back to Lyon for the week, having had my fair share of Lederhosen, sausage, and German accents. I was less than excited to walk up to board the plane back to Lyon and find that it was a propeller plane. During the hour and a half long flight, I had a hard time solving the dilemma of wanting to look out the window to take in the sights of Switzerland and the Alps, and not wanting to constantly be reminded about the fact that I was in a prop-plane.
Yet, as we started our descent into Lyon I realized that I was very happy to be, in a sense, almost home.
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