Hello, Germany!

Friday night I grabbed a purse and headed off to join 150 students going to Munich.  I was running about 15 late thanks to a slow train and was a little concerned I would miss something important, but I had nothing to fear.  I arrived, met up with some friends, and stood around for an hour before we were able to load onto the buses and wait there for another hour.  Finally we left and drove through the night through Italy, Switzerland, and Germany until we reached Munich at 6:30 in the morning.  We hung out by the buses and had breakfast before we walked over to Oktoberfest and the group I was with started waiting in lines.  The way things work at Oktoberfest is there are many different tent/buildings, each serving a different kind of beer.  You wait in line until you can get into a tent, grab a seat if you can find one, and enjoy beer and food until you want to go to another tent.  There is also a whole carnival connected, so you can go on rides if you want.  Which seemed a little funny to me considering how much beer was being consumed.  If you need any extra help throwing up...

Anyway, my group spent a couple hours waiting in different lines and then leaving them.  Let me just say it's much better to say what you want to do when someone asks you than to say you're up for anything and then complain about what you end up in line for.  The group lost someone, and some people went to go find her, and then others went to find them, and after a while my friend Angela and I figured we had become a group of two.  It was perfect!  We wandered around looking at things for a while, made our way into one of the tents and wandered around it for over half an hour looking for any available seats before we left.  After that, we went to get brats.  Gloria and Carla were with me then, along with the ghosts of brats eaten at Bass Lake.  After that, we decided to leave Oktoberfest and have adventures in Munich.  We quickly ran into a few Italian guys who were desperately searching for a Starbucks.  There are no Starbucks in Italy, but one of these guys had studied for a while in London and apparently got to really like Starbucks.  He was pumped to have the chance to find one in Munich.  I thought that was funny.  Angela and I spent most of the day wandering Munich.  We tried on clothes in a secondhand store, admired the jewelry in an antique jewelry store, and had a snack in nice park we found which we found out later was called the "English Garden."  It was surrounded by all kinds of fancy-pants stores like Gucci, Ralph Lauren, Prada... you know, the stuff you find in Milan, as well as some really upscale German stores.  We wandered freely, and when we decided to go back, we asked people which direction Oktoberfest was, and one woman said it was impossible to walk--it was too far!  We asked someone else, and he said it was in that direction, if we wanted to walk all night.  We got there in about half an hour.  There were flowers growing out of windows in a lot of the buildings--it was gorgeous and I loved it!  When we got back to Oktoberfest, we slipped into a seating area right away just before the guards closed it off so not too many people would flood in, and found people leaving a table.  It was a little astounding how easy it was this time to get a seat, when we had tried for hours earlier and not been able to!  So we sat, and Angela ordered a beer.  They brought her the full liter, so we had an excuse to stay a long time.  Some guys sat down at the table with us, and after a while a guy walked up--a stranger--who apparently had to leave immediately but had half a beer left and instead of wasting it, gave it to our table so one of us could finish it.  The people around me all had their own beers and there was no way I was going to drink a half-finished beer that some stranger dropped off, but it was nice to put in front of me and hold every once in a while to validate sitting at the table so long.  The guys (who were Italian, by the way; we couldn't stop running into Italian men in Germany) left, and a couple girls sat down.  They were really nice, and they were the only Germans we interacted with at Oktoberfest!  Hmm.  One funny thing about the day was that there were stands all over selling stuff that made sense like glazed nuts, brats and other sausages and huge pretzels, but there were also a ton of stands selling heart-shaped gingerbread cookies of various sizes with words written in frosting on them.  They were on ribbons, and people hung them around their necks like huge pendant necklaces.  It was so funny!  Couples would buy them for each other, parents would buy them for children, and people would buy them for themselves.  One woman we saw had three around her neck: small (the diameter was maybe the same as a grapefruit), medium (the size of a small dinnerplate), and large (you could lie a baby on it if you wanted).  She had adjusted the lengths of the ribbons the hearts were hung on and proudly arranged them so that there was no overlap.  She looked like she had a gingerbread torso.

It was a little tough finding our way back to the buses since it was about 10 minutes walking away from the festival, we had been led in a large group early in the morning, and no one told us we would need to find our own way back alone or in small groups in the darkness.  We eventually made it back about half an hour late after getting a little lost.  It didn't really matter that we were late, though, because none of the trip leaders were back yet.  It was about two and a half hours until everyone made it back onto the buses and we were able to leave.  I got back to my apartment at about 7:30 in the morning and flopped into bed.

Several hours later I woke up, showered, and journeyed forth to find a church I've been wanting to go to for a couple weeks.  I found it after getting a little lost and felt bad for walking in late, but hey--I wasn't about to turn around and go back to my apartment.  I love the church!  I'll admit, I'm a little spoiled when it comes to worship, but I love their emphasis on prayer and how the sermon was chock full of Scriptures.  There's a Bible study that meets Tuesday nights, and I'm looking forward to checking it out.  And guess what?  One girl from the church goes to the university where I am studying, and it turns out she lives in my apartment building two doors down!  As we were riding the train together, we found out that one girl she became friends with at the university last semester is the sister of a girl I hung out with in the Dominican Republic!  What are the odds, huh?