Oktoberfest begins in September!!!

Oktoberfest is the world famous, annual 16-day beer drinking festival in Munich.  While it is arguably the most famous and largest (6.5million+)  festival in the world, there are several ‘petty little details’ that most foreign visitors are quite unaware of.

 

Petty little detail #1: Oktoberfest begins in mid-September and ends the first Sunday in October.  Started in 1810, Oktoberfest is a big fair. It has rides and activities and beer, beer and more beer (on avg. 7 million liters served).  The beer is served at tables in beer tents (17 large tents - featuring beer from the top breweries in Munich and 20 small tents - featuring other non-beer specialties). 

Petty little detail # 2: The beer tents are ONLY accessible by reserved ticket. Tickets to the most important tents are sold to large corporations, banks, consulting and law firms, … (you know the ‘A-list’ of German notables, celebrities, business executives and their associates)… early in the year. At about the same time, savvy Germans buy up all of the available individual tickets in every tent. In order to accommodate the hordes of visitors, the tickets each have an entrance time.

Petty little detail #3: The tents officially open at noon, but you must be in line about 2 hours ahead of your scheduled entrance time. Who on earth drinks beer at lunch time??? And, who would want to stand online for 2 hours in order to do so??? However, in order to accommodate families and older people who are attending the fair, only ‘quiet’ music is played in the tents until 6pm.

Petty little detail # 4:  The beer is more expensive and stronger than the normal German beer AND there are always lots of drunken young guys hanging around.  

Nonetheless, Oktoberfest is fun!! If you are not ‘set-on’ getting into the tents, Munich is definitely the place to be. It is truly a ‘must do’ happening (been there, done that!!).

However, if you just want to sample some good German beer, visit the smaller Oktoberfests which are now being held throughout Germany.  They usually have only one tent, are accessible without a ticket and serve a wide variety of beers from microbreweries located throughout the country.

Oh, by the way, if you haven’t booked a hotel room in Munich far in advance of Oktoberfest, you can forget it. There is nothing available within 100kms and certainly not at a reasonable rate!! BUT, in other places, all over Germany, there are plenty of nice accommodations available – at good prices - in small-family owned hotels.

Germany: Wine Festivals..now is the time

If you are visiting any of the wine regions in Germany during the month of September, be sure to visit a wine festival or two, or even three. These ‘fests’ generally feature the top wines or sekts (sparkling wines) from the region. On two consecutive weekends, 30 to 40 local vinters set-up small stands in their towns, villages and even smaller cities so that visitors can sample their wine. Wine aficionados (read: real drinkers) bring their own glasses – tied by the stem to a leather thong which is worn around the neck. (My question: Are they just well-prepared [‘have glass will drink’] OR do they just want to avoid paying the 5€ pfand [return glass deposit]???)

Wine fests are not only a fun way to sample the various wines of the region, but also to see how ‘the other half lives’ (that is, people our age - middle-age, baby-boomers, mature adults). Trust me, they live pretty well. In Germany, people our age have full social calendars and wine fests are just one of a wide variety of autumn activities.  If you want to get to know the locals, this is a great place to strike up a conversation.  

As you drive through the wine areas, you will see numerous stands and even restaurants offering ‘Neuer Wein’ (new wine - Federweisser). This wine - which is made from ‘must’ (freshly fermented pressed grape juice) - is yellowish in color and is quite tasty, especially when served with Zweibelkuchen (onion cake). However, I must offer a few words of caution: 1. Keep the bottles upright because the screw caps never fit securely and the wine (which attracts zillion of tiny flies) leaks out. 2. Never drink more than 1 bottle per night.  As the Germans say, new wine will ‘clean your clock’ (laxative-wise)!!

Wine, wine.. everywhere in Germany and France!!

I am in the States at the moment, trying to get my Roaming Thru Europe travel program off the ground. The program is designed for baby-boomers  (couples, mainly) and women (of all ages) who wish to make a self-drive vacation in Europe. Stay tuned for more details…

At any rate, since I was working so hard, I decided to go to the liquor store and buy a bottle of wine to ease the pain.  Boy, was I shocked!! The prices of wine are so-o-o high here: $16.99 for a fairly decent bottle.

So, now dear wine-drinking friends who are planning to travel to Germany and France: I have some very, very, important  information  for you. When you want to buy a bottle of wine, head to a supermarket, not to a wine shop. The prices are downright cheap!!  You can get a good bottle of wine  – from anywhere in the world – for under 6€. (I only go to a wine shop to purchase wine when I need a gift. Their free wrapping service makes any bottle look much more expensive than it is!)

In German supermarkets, you will find aisles and aisles of wines from all over the world – including Germany. In French supermarkets, you will find aisles and aisles of French wine and a half aisle of wine from somewhere else!!  I am not a wine connoisseur (merely an imbiber), but I like Pinotage from the Western Cape of South Africa (red wine), and I love Prosecco (sparking white wine) from Italy!!

 

In the summer, there is nothing better than a glass of chilled Prosecco served with chilled gummy bears!! Try it!!

Germany: street names - Grosse Bleiche (bleaching lawn)

I just finished reading a blog post by ‘The guy’ at www.flightsandfrustration.com. He wrote a nice review of a quaint 1920s hotel in Hamburg.  According to the post, the hotel is located on a street called ‘Grosse Bleichen’.

That started me thinking… As I roam through Europe, especially Germany, I often wonder how the streets got their names. It is quite obvious many of the streets are named for German industrialists (Bosch, Siemens, Daimler) while others are named for famous people (Schweitzer, Goethe, Gutenberg).

Other names are clearly meant to provide travelers with directional information. Apparently any street which is named for a town or city leads directly to that place. For instance, the ’Mainzer Landstrasse’ leads from the countryside into the city of Mainz (‘land’ means countryside). Similarly, ‘Hauptstrasse’ means main street, ‘Bahnhofstrasse’ means trainstation street, and so it goes.

However, there is also a classification of street names which are even more descriptive; and, I find, quite intriguing. ‘Grosse Bleichen’ is one of those names.  In the ‘oldest’ part of almost any old town or city in Germany, you will find a group of streets which bear some form of the word ‘bleiche’.

In Mainz, for instance, there is an entire old district named the Bleichenviertel. The streets in this quarter are named: Große Bleiche, Mittlere Bleiche und Hintere Bleiche (that is: the big bleiche, the middle bleiche, and behind the bleiche).

The word ‘bleiche‘ means ‘bleach’. In Mainz from the Middle Ages to the 17^th century, the Bleichenverteil – a relatively flat area which was located near two streams of water - was the area where the women of the town and the laundresses from the military hospital took their newly washed, wet laundry and laid it on the lawns (meadows) to dry ... and to be bleached by the sun!! As a result that area was called the ‘bleaching lawns’.

While I do not remember such descriptive street names in the upstate New York area where I grew up in the USA, I do however remember the names of the towns which were indicative of the trades of the people who lived there: ‘Gloversville’ (the people made gloves), ‘Tannersville’ (the people tanned the leather to make the gloves and other leather products), Mechanicsville (these were the master craftsmen: millers, carpenters, butchers who worked in what was called the Mechanical Arts in the early 1890s). 

I also remember that the names came from not just one, but from many sources. The Dutch (Spuyten Duyvil, Stuyvesant, Kinderhook, Amsterdam, Bleecker), the British (York, Albany, Charlestown, Jamestown) and of course, because the Dutch and the English were not the original settlers of the area, many of the villages, towns as well as the streams, lakes and rivers bear names bestowed upon them by the Native Americans tribes who lived there: Wappinger, Tuckahoe, Ticonderoga, Taghkanic, Susquehanna, Saratoga, Saranac, Sagaponack, Nyack, Niagara, Copake,  Cossayuna, Coxsackie Canandaigua, etc. And, for some odd reason, even to this day if you visit towns in the Hudson valley south of Albany, you will find lots of families with Dutch family names.

While I think it is really nice to understand the derivation of German words, it makes quite proud to think about how multi-cultural my homeland is… and has been since ‘the beginning’.