“Just make sure to pace yourself,” a young German couple at Maurushaus told us before they left. We were sitting at the breakfast table, picking from the buffet spread of eggs, cereal, and cold meat on bread, and laying down a foundation that I would be grateful for later. Pace myself? No sweat. A single White Claw is often enough to leave my entire body red and hot as a sitting kettle. If there’s anything I know about drinking, it’s moderation.
After the train ride back to Munich, we dropped off our bags at the Airbnb where our affable host, Tom, tried to answer any questions we had. “My friends reserved a table,” he said sheepishly. “I’m not sure what state I’ll be in later.” It took until I arrived to understand how it all worked. The festival itself was like Coney Island without the beach: food stalls, carnival games, unicorn balloons and chocolate hearts, souvenir shops bedecked in streamers, and, of course, beer halls. There were only six registered beer halls allowed on site, and we went to three of them.
Shocking to us, all the places served only one kind of beer—an amber lager simply called Oktoberfest—in addition to a shandy and a non-alcoholic beer, all for the same price. Naturally, we bought the Oktoberfest. Arriving after the lunchtime rush and before the dinner crowds, we were able to snag seats without trouble. At the first tent, Ochsenbraterei, we struck up a conversation with a German family with whom we were sharing a long table, enjoying traditional music from a live band on a raised platform inside the voluminous Big Top.
We moved on to some people watching at Hofbräu Haus next, well-known to attract the most obnoxious and raucous Americans. It was your typical mad haus, with pretzel hawkers filling the aisles and people standing up on tables, only to get yanked down by security (this, in an effort to condemn the spectacle and not, as we’d previously believed, to rush them to the hospital). With half of my second liter of beer to go—and a perverse inclination to want to buy a plush hat in the likeness of a chicken—I knew I had reached my limit. “I’ll be right back,” I said to Courtney, before calmly puking my guts out in the bathroom.
Newly refreshed, I returned to the table, only to find that Courtney had finished not only her stein but mine. “You looked like you needed help,” she said, goading me in the woodland-print dirndl she’d bought in Füssen. We sauntered up to our third and final tent, anxious to try the roast chicken we’d heard so much about. But while Courtney was making conversation with three new friends from Minnesota (one of whom was already fast asleep on the table), I quietly ate the entire chicken myself.
Feeling terrible, and charged with the new responsibility of making sure Courtney got to some sustenance, I navigated us to the only place I knew how: a Chinese restaurant. At night, coming back from dinner, we stopped in front of the Pinakothek der Moderne, touted as having one of the largest modern art collections in Europe. Outside was a curious exhibit, a UFO-like structure with a bright glowing interior. We pressed our faces up to the glass, peering inside like eager kids.
“Don’t you wish this could transport us back home?” Courtney said, with a hiccup. It was peaceful and dark, and we still had another mile to our Airbnb.
Without warning, we started chasing each other around the vast, empty courtyard and laughing, the sound of our voices hurtling toward the sky. We lay down in the grass, looking up together at the stars. Courtney rested her head on me; it was warm against my chest. No, I thought to myself. There was nowhere I would rather be.