Frühlingsfest!

Spring (Frühling) is here!  Baseball season is underway (we are streaming the Dbacks over the internet), the flowers are in bloom, and the Biergartens have come to life.  People here find all kinds of excuses to drink beer and the arrival of spring happens to be a big one!  Frühlingsfest, the little sister to Oktoberfest, recently took place in Munich so we set out in our Bavarian outfits with our friends to welcome in the spring.

Of course the ladies looked better:

Frühlingsfest had the feel of a typical State Fair in America (or a rodeo for those Texans) complete with tons of sketchy rides that spin, a Ferris wheel, lots of junk food (including cotton candy), people in costumes, and beer.  We played it safe and took a ride on the Ferris wheel.

One of our favorite sightings was the super American cheeseburger (nobody ate one though)!

After cruising around for a while we made our way into the soul of Frühlingsfest, the larger than life beer tents.  These things are really incredible and gave us a small taste of what Oktoberfest might feel like.  See for yourself:

We weren’t able to find a seat in the blue Augustiner tent, but had better luck at the Hippodrom (Greek origin meaning horse tent).  We first sat down to a relatively mellow crowd around 7 p.m., and it was comical how you could significantly notice the energy level increase hour by hour (the beers only come in one size, 1 liter or around 32 OZ).  At first there were a few people up dancing to the traditional Bavarian music, but by 10 p.m. everyone is up dancing on the benches and the music has evolved into international pop classics (many American- Sweet Caroline, I’ve Got a Hangover….Oaaah, etc.):

A group of 16 year olds showed up at our table (yes, I asked them their age) and were carded before being given their giant beers (rightly so).  About 4 sips later, they were pretty drunk, and naturally I made pretty good friends with one of them.

We closed out the evening playing some carnival games.  Eddie is a soccer player so naturally he won his girlfriend a stuffed animal toy with his skills.  Hoping to keep pace with Eddie, I became really competitive at the old western shooting range.  I hit about 13 out of 15 targets while the others kept wasting their ‘shots’ on some silly, practical joke water cannon that shot water on the passersby.  Well the joke was on me in the end because it turns out this was a non-contest game and there was no prize to be won.  I put up about a one minute argument with the game attendant before I got through the language barrier to realize there was no prize.  At least I’ve still got a pretty nice shot though!