It wasn’t until about 10 p.m. that I saw my first corpse, but then again, it was only Monday. I was pretty certain the bodies would grow more plentiful closer to the week’s end. Not that earnestly imbibing revellers were in any form of short supply, of course, including numbers of the overly enthusiastic kind well be on their way to becoming what Münchners jokingly call “Bierleichen,” or “beer corpses.” Yet even with almost every seat in almost every tent taken by merrymakers excitedly waving about their one liter Mass steins, even with the bands blaring full-throttle versions of “Ein Prosit,” the “Chicken Dance” and “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” and even with the party already dialed up to 11, if not beyond, the whole scene struck me as, well, almost subdued. This was, after all, Germany’s famed Oktoberfest, the event to which thousands, no, hundreds of thousands of visitors flock each and every year, in search of fun, frivolity, and of course, beer. This was it, the big one, the beer blast to end all beer blasts! So why did it feel less like the stereotypical frat house party on Teutonic steroids and more like a merely boisterous Bavarian cultural fair? The answer to that ponderous query would come, but not for many hours and numerous liters of beer. In the meantime, I had a carousel to catch. Truth be told, it was by sheer happenstance that I even found myself on the great field known as the Theresienwiese, home to Oktoberfest and known to locals as simply die wiesn. (That’s “vee-sn,” meaning meadow, as opposed to the confusingly similar beer terms weisse―“vice”―and weizen―“vite-zen”―meaning white and wheat respectively.) I had not previously even thought to attend, mainly because the fest always put me in mind of a massively oversized beer hall, and I had visited and much preferred the smaller ones operating year-round across Munich and Bavaria. Or, at least, that’s what I believed. Then I was invited to speak at the Stockholm Beer and Whisky Festival and, employing the patently illogical reasoning of the compulsive traveler, decided that since I was going to be in Sweden anyway, I had might as well pop down to Munich, a mere 1,200 miles away. Which is exactly what I booked, discovering quite to my delight that the three-way flight wouldn’t even cost me that much more than if I had purchased a straight Toronto-Stockholm return ticket. Pity, then, about the lack of hotel rooms.
This was, after all, Germany’s famed Oktoberfest, the event to which thousands, no, hundreds of thousands of visitors flock each and every year, in search of fun, frivolity, and of course, beer.
Show Me the Money
One of the great truisms about Oktoberfest is that it is a cash cow for the city’s tourism industry, with some visitors booking their accommodations for the following year’s edition even as they depart the current year’s festivities. Affordable rooms are snatched up fast―such as they are! A one-star hostelry in the city center can go for 150 euro a night, and by the time I was ready to make my reservation late in the summer, pretty much everything in the city was gone. Fortunately, I had an ace up my sleeve in the form of Augsburg, a charming, mid-sized city less than an hour by train from Munich’s Hauptbahnhof, or central station, and more importantly, somewhere with available hotel rooms. It might not have been the most convenient of lodgings, but it was still a bed and a roof and a place to store my stuff. Which is how I wound up on die wiesn on the night of the first Monday of Oktoberfest, alone and, despite the Konig Ludwig Weissbier I enjoyed on the train―civilized travel indeed!―very thirsty. There were beer tents to explore, of course, but also an interesting-looking merry-go-round near the St. Paul’s Church end of the grounds. I had found the Karussellbar. Accommodating mere dozens of drinkers, as opposed to the thousands who cram the massive beer tents, the Karussellbar is a sort of oasis of calm amid the noise and confusion of Oktoberfest, and one serving Franziskaner Weissbier, to boot! I boarded at the first opportunity, grabbed a glass of fresh, spicy wheat beer and in short order found myself engaged in conversation with a pair of lederhosen-clad Münchners. 
As we spun in a lazy circle, I expressed my surprise at seeing young men in their twenties wearing such traditional attire, especially on what would appear to be a simple night out drinking. They admitted that it was hardly their ordinary apparel, but added that during Oktoberfest it is common for Bavarians to sport their lederhosen and, for women, dirndls. And when else would they trot out the leather britches, I asked, although not exactly in so many words? “Pretty much only during Oktoberfest,” they replied in near harmony. Finished my half-liter of weisse, I excused myself from the carousel to explore the 70 acres of Therese’s Meadow, so named for the Princess Therese von Sachsen-Hildburghausen, whose marriage to Prince Ludwig I of Bavaria triggered the start of Oktoberfest exactly two hundred years ago this fall. It was on these exact grounds that a horse racing course was built to mark the wedding ceremony, and where the original celebration principally took place. It was also here that Münchners decided to repeat the bash a year later, and for every year since, save the two dozen or so occasions on which Oktoberfest has been canceled due to war or pestilence.
