We had the most amazing weekend at Oktoberfest! We couchsurfed with a 6’8 German named Ingo who is awesome and not only welcomed us into his home but also served as our tour guide.

We showed up Saturday evening to Ingo and Angela’s house which is in the suburbs of Munich. We walked into a housewarming/ birthday party so there were a lot of people milling around. As is my nature I just jumped in and started meeting people! It helps that Ingo is a fanatic about everybody wearing name tags so it was especially easy not to forget names.

Matt and me with Ingo

Almost everybody at the party spoke a bit of English and one of Ingo’s friends, Leighton, is British so that made it easier. Ingo was also hosting another surfer, Jackie, from Boston who was new to the mix as well. After a couple of beers we weren’t feeling shy and we were dancing and singing. Ingo passed out Oktoberfest songbooks and had them playing over the entertainment system. I don’t speak any German so the locals thought it was pretty funny when I tried belting out the words in an American accent. They were all very helpful and amused that we were so willing to try to learn the songs anyway.

The party lasted into the early morning but we didn’t get to sleep-in too long the next day because the film crew from the German telelvision station was due at noon and there were a lot of people queued for shower time!

A couple days before we arrived in Munich Ingo had written me an e-mail asking if it was okay if the news station did a story on us couchsurfing with him. Apparently Alaskans coming to Oktoberfest isn’t as common as we would imagine. Of course we agreed, I mean, it’s a good story at least! So bright and early Sunday afternoon the television people arrived to do their piece on Couchsurfing.com.

It was fun getting interviewed and setting up the scenes. They had us put our backpacks on and walk up to Ingo’s house as if we had just arrived. Then they shot video of us walking into the bedroom and settling in. I was surprised that they used my interview footage because I kept looking at the camera! Apparently there’s a lot I need to learn before making a career in Hollywood.

Having a beer with the tv crew in Munich

The best part about getting interviewed for German Television is that the crew was able to get us into the Lowenbraur beer tent and get us a table, which is unheard of opening weekend! We didn’t even show up to Oktoberfest until 3pm and the tents had been closed for hours.

Sitting in the tent is unlike anything I have ever experienced! You can hardly call them tents. They are more like airplane hangars and there are thousand of people in each one! The barmaids are all burley and can carry about 100 pounds in beer through crowds. No hotties in dirndles here! Leighton was telling us how they make so much money in the two weeks of Oktoberfest a lot of them don’t work full-time the rest of the year.

We sat at our table for a few hours drinking and singing. I made it through three liters before I was really feeling it. In the U.S. vendors would be probably walking around selling hot dogs and french fries and other greasy food. At Oktoberfest everybody was eating radishes and pretzels. So different!

Ingo and his radish

After going through quite a few liters we decided to walk around the festival and see what the Germans get up to. Ingo took us to the devil’s wheel which is an ancient ride that has been around forever. It’s this wheel on the ground that spins and people get on it and they get it going pretty fast and the goal is to see how long you can stay on. It’s fun to watch people fly off left and right. Once it gets down to the last couple of people then the carnies start dropping a large weight from the ceiling to hit people off and if that doesn’t work then they use ropes to try to lasso people off the wheel. I even got to box a girl on the wheel, but mostly I just fell over. Matt still has a horrible case of rope burn that runs from this forehead down to his cheek. He’s lucky that it missed his eye!

After we spent a significant amount of time at the Devil’s Wheel we decided that we were ravenous! It was off to the half chickens for us. I must say that the food at Oktoberfest is amazing. They have these chickens on the rotisserie all day and they are ridiculously juicy and flavorful, especially after a night of liter beers and the Devil’s Wheel.

The beers are big at Oktoberfest!

While everybody else in our party was working on getting our chickens Matt and I were standing on the sidewalk watching people pass in variations of stumbling. A group of Italians was walking our direction and one of them was obviously wasted. He stumbled and fell at my feet and then grabbed my leg. I thought that he was just trying to pull himself up and I was about to try to help him when all of a sudden I felt this shooting pain in my leg. He was biting me! I gave out a yelp and Matt kicked him in the back making him fall over again. I was so stunned I wasn’t sure what had just happened. I turned to Matt and cried, “I think he bit me!” By this time the kids friends had run over and grabbed him and were trying to get him to walk away.  Matt started yelling and the kids and the least drunk of them were trying to apologize for their drunk friend.

Once it hit me that the kid had actually bit me I got super pissed! I walked over to where the kids friends were holding him up. “Who bit me, ” I yelled. “You bit me?” I slapped him across the cheek and then shook my finger in his face yelling, “No! You don’t bite people!” It felt like the equivalent of reprimanding a dog, which was probably his cognizant level at that point.

His friends were starting to yell at us when Ingo started walking over to resolve the situation. Once they saw a 6’8 Bavarian heading their way they grabbed their friend by his arms and starting high tailing it toward the exit.

The rest of our night passed without as much excitement and I had quite forgotten the whole incident by the next morning. It wasn’t until I was complaining about all the bruises on my legs from the Devil’s Wheel that Jackie pointed at my leg and said, “That’s not from the Devil’s Wheel! That’s where that guy bit you!” Sure enough there was a perfect bit mark in deep black and purple on my calf, which is still a dark bruise almost a week later so that tells you how hard he bit me!

The rest of our weekend was not nearly as exciting as dancing on tables and getting bit on by Italians. We did spend a bit of Monday walking around Oktoberfest then we headed into Munich to check out the city. Of course we had to stop for lunch at the Hofbräuhaus and buy tshirts. After all, we are tourists!

Matt\’s Budapest Slalom

Budapest has proven to be my favorite city so far on our tour. The city is actually composed of three cities that have slowly amalgamated into one big city, Buda, Pest and Obuda. The Danube River separates Buda and Pest and they couldn’t be more different. Buda is built into tall rock walls that served as easily defendable fortresses back in the 1300s and Pest is a large flat plain that was perfect for agriculture. We have spent most of our time exploring Buda which has been a good workout considering how steep we have to walk uphill to get to any of the monuments.

Last night Matt, Jon and I toured that natural caves that the river created under Buda. There was a large group from our hostel and it was fun to go with other English speakers our age. Our guide was hilarious! He’s a cross between Borat and the narrator in Everything is Illuminated. He was full of funny stories and dirty jokes. At one point we were all sitting down in a small chamber and one of the guys in our group suggested that we turn off our headlamps to experience total darkness. Once we all turned our lights off and were sitting there our guide said, “In the dark, you cannot see anything,” at which we were all thinking duh. Then a couple seconds later he said, “Except my cock.” It was so random it took us all to get it.

We also got to slither through some pretty narrow openings. At one point I slipped while trying to crawl sideways through an opening using only my left hand and left foot while trying to keep my butt in the air. Needless to say my butt got a bit wedged and I felt like a beached whale trying to wiggle forward. I had the guide in front of me telling my that my bum is too big while I can see the flashes of the camera as Matt is behind me taking pictures of the very embarrassing predicament. To make matters worse I was the first person in our group to go so I also had the other ten people watching me lament my big bum. By the end of the tour we were exhausted and all slept very well last night!

Today we walked up to St. Mathias Cathedral which I took a video of me holing a golden eagle. I really liked St. Mathias Cathedral because it’s old and beautiful, but not too big. It makes sense that they still hold mass there regularly unlike at the Vatican where it feels unreal.

Matt and I spent the afternoon in the turkish bathes, which was an adventure just trying to figure out what we were supposed to do. Nobody speaks English that great and the workers there are super rude! The bathes were neat though and definitely worth visiting. All the tile work and plumbing is from when they were originally built by the Turks when they invaded the area hundreds of years ago.

Tomorrow we are off to Salzburg. Not what kind of trouble we are going to rouse on our drive through the Alps. It should be good!

Once again I only have a few moments to write a quick blog.

Right now we are in Bratislava, but about to take off to Budapest for a couple days.  I’m not sure what to think about Bratislava. We stopped in for the night because we had to drive through it on the way to Budapest anyway and how many people really come visit Slovakia?

It’s an interesting city with a cross between old world buildings and a castle and outside of downtown are miles of concrete apartment high rises, which we can only imagine are remnants from the communist era. The city has been easier to walk around mostly because it is paved with flat bricks, not all cobble stone. My legs are so sore from the cobble stone in Prague!

It’s obvious why the majority of people over here are naturally very slim. They walk everywhere and there are tons of hills. Who needs a gym when you walk in from the suburbs everyday?

The weather has not been ideal. Cold and rainy, but it’s supposed to get better. In reality we only had a few hours to explore Bratislava which isn’t enough to appreciate what it has to offer. I’m sure that the country side is beautiful with more castles and whatnot.

I made a hello from Bratislava video, but these computers suck and I haven’t been able to upload it yet. Hopefully our next hostel will have decent computers. I’m amazed at how slow the internet has been so far!

I am in Prague at the moment using our hostel’s free internet, but it’s almost 2am here and I only have about 10 minutes to write a quick blog.

The trip has been great so far. A little bit of poor weather, but we haven’t let that slow us down! Thank god my mom loaned me her very cute rain coat!

Today we walked around Prague, alot! My feet hurt. Boo. The cobble stone always takes a little getting used to. We found the super market and went there for breakfast which was awesome. Not only because it’s about 5 times cheaper than eating out, but I also go some fresh fruit and yogurt which I was craving. We also found the post office and were able to mail off a handful of postcards which are actually quite expensive when you take into account internationa postage.

We also managed to run into a Hard Rock cafe souvenir store. Apparently the restaurant is opening next month and we are among the small group of trendsetters who get to buy hard rock paraphenalia before the mass public. But, that’s how we roll.

It looks like JimAzing posted my little Greetings from Prague video that I e-mailed earlier today. Funny story: the cobble stone was super slippery and I decided that it would be a good idea to do cart-wheels in the court yard of the Prague castle. A group of foreign tourists, who happened to walk in just as I was starting, were convinced that I was going to slip and break something, probably my neck. I don’t know if their oooohs are audible on that particular version but it was hilarious to film because I was falling apart. Kleenex was falling out of my pocket, coins were flying everywhere, I’m still not sure how my hat managed to stay on.

Well, my time is almost up, but I promise I will write more soon!

Jing Qui,

Casey