Imagine the Royal Easter Show. There are rides, food stalls and families with young children in attendance. Now add beer. Lots and lots of beer. And now you have Oktoberfest.

Along with the food stalls and rides, each of the major breweries has a tent at Oktoberfest. In these tents you can hang out, drink steins of beer and eat ginormous pretzels and hot BBQ chooks. In the tent you must find a table and seat, then you can flag down a friendly barmaid and she'll keep you supplied with food and drinks for the duration of your stay (a generous tip on your first round will ensure that she remains attentive.) Some of the barmaids are impressively strong. We saw some barmaids carrying five or six 1-litre steins. I struggled lifting just one of those steins.


Drinking beer is the number one past time at Oktoberfest. This means that if you do want to get a seat in a beer tent you pretty much have to turn up when the tent opens at 10am. You then spend the whole day in that tent because if you leave you lose your seat. You won't be able to get a seat in another tent as they stop letting people in when they reach capacity.

The beer drinking starts at 10am (what else are you going to do when you're in the beer tent? Listen to the oompah band?) and you drink 1-litre steins. I wasn't a beer drinker before my visit to Oktoberfest and even though I was only drinking Radlers (the German name for a Shandy - beer and lemonade) by the end of our two days at Oktoberfest I'd drunk enough beer to become accustomed to the taste.

Apparently Oktoberfest made me into a better person. At the end of our time at Oktoberfest Andrew said to me "you know hunni, I didn't think it was possible to love you more but I do now that you're a beer drinker."

More photos (slideshow) on Flickr.

Our visit to Oktoberfest was part of our Beerfest trip to Germany in 2006 (eek! almost four years ago). We spent a week or so in Germany with Tash and Nat. This is the first entry from that trip.