The life and times of a pop-culture junkie and music addict living in Arlington, Virginia
If not for Bevchen of Confuzzledom, I would not have known there was a statue of Paddington Bear inside Paddington Station. I’ve been in the station many times, and I even knew about the Paddington Bear store, but I didn’t know there was a statue until Bev mentioned it.
I was in London over the last few days, so I made sure to find the statue for myself. Here it is, the bronze Paddington by sculptor and artist Marcus Cornish:
Do you have any favorite statues to visit when you travel?
It’s Oktoberfest time!
Oktoberfest is the world’s largest fair, and it runs for sixteen days every year from late September to the first Sunday in October. (It runs for seventeen or eighteen days on years when the first Sunday in October is the 1st or 2nd of the month, because the 3rd of October is a holiday here, German Unity Day.) It was started in 1810 to celebrate the marriage of King Ludwig I to Therese
This year’s Oktoberfest started on September 22nd and runs through Sunday October 6th. In Bavaria, its often referred to simply as die Wiesn. This refers back to the name Theresienwiese (Theresa’s Meadow), the fairgrounds in the center of Munich where it takes place.
Many of my bloggy friends in Germany have written about Oktoberfest. LLMW wrote “Best Bets for enjoying Munich’s Oktoberfest & the Parade” and Alex wrote about how to get a seat at oktoberfest in munich.
Factoids for everyone!
I went to Oktoberfest on a Thursday with Jenny. The day before, it had been sunny in Munich. Not so on our chosen day.
This is the Hippodrom tent, one of the first tents seen when you enter Theresienwiese. It’s very popular with the younger crowds.
Inside the Hippodrom tent, at around 4pm on a Thursday:
A percentage of the tables in each tent can be reserved. Often, companies reserve these tables and food is on standby for these reservations.
A job I would not want: Dishwasher at Oktoberfest. This is one of many racks of beer steins ready to be filled.
The Hofbräu Festzelt. (Zelt means tent.)
The Augustiner tent.
The Löwenbräu (Lion’s Brew!) tent. The Lion is mechanical- it lifts the stein and drinks, then roars. Highly entertaining.
The Paulaner tent.
Sekt is champagne. This was a wine tent. As a result, it was a bit more mellow than the other tents.
Theresienwiese is adjacent to the Bavaria Statue.
As with all festivals in Germany, there are places to buy Lebkuchenherzen (gingerbread hearts) on ribbons. They’re decorated with various phrases, and it’s traditional to buy one for your significant other. It’s not uncommon to see people walking down the street wearing these.
This carriage was pulled by six of the most enormous horses I have ever seen in my life.
This one had slightly smaller horses. Still big, though.
Jenny and I found a table for lunch in the Schottenhamel tent. The Schottenhamel tent is where everything begins- on the first day of Oktoberfest, no beer is allowed to be served until noon. That’s when the mayor of Munich taps the first keg in the Schottenhamel tent, proclaiming, “O’zapft is!” (It’s tapped!)
Prost!
Bavarian men always seem to have such jaunty hats.
Just one of these is heavy. This woman must have incredible upper body strength.
Children in Tracht (traditional clothing) are pretty much always adorable.
I do love the giant pretzels…
After lunch, we went back outside, to check out the rest of the fest. There’s a lot of rides. This is the view as you’re approaching the front of Theresienwiese. That ride with the airplane on top goes much higher and faster than we expected.
I’m still trying to figure out why a) this one has American flags all over it, and b) the breakdancer is a Gremlin.
There are several places to ride bumper cars, which is a great idea after drinking a few liters of beer.
The ferris wheel at the back seemed like a good idea, because the gondolas are covered.
These next two pictures were taken from the ferris wheel, during one of the many rain bursts.
You can just barely make out the white balloon with a red cross in this picture. That balloon made it easy to find the first aid tent from a distance- kind of ingenious, in my opinion.
While most of the locals went with traditional Lederhosen and Dirndls, a few people went with a more modern take on Bavarian garb. I like to think of the guy on the left as Bavarian Jesus.
Do you have any fun Oktoberfest stories?
Ali over at Ali Adventures recently posted about what it cost for her and Andy to travel through Europe for two months, and also what it cost just for their trip to the Netherlands. This sort of number crunching is always kind of interesting to me, so I wanted to break out some of my own spending.
Before I get into the numbers, I wanted to say this: I don’t spend a whole lot of money at home. My rent and utilities are a little more than 20% of my income. Once I had the basic things I needed for my life here, I stopped buying. The walls of my apartment are unadorned- I never put up any art or curtains here. I bought one light fixture for the ceiling but never actually wired it in. I have a fair amount of gadgetry, but for the most part I live a pretty frugal existence. I don’t care to spend a lot of money on my residence here because I don’t actually spend much time there outside of the work week. If there’s a chance to be traveling to somewhere new, I’d rather be doing that.
I’ll be paying for this year’s travel well into next year, and I’m OK with that. Let’s talk numbers.
My tracking is a little less accurate than Ali’s post, for several reasons. First of all, my banking is spread across both American and German bank accounts, and my statistics come from my use of Mint.com, which is only valid for the US bank accounts. (I love Mint though- I never really understood just where my money went until I started using it a few years back.)
Secondly, and far more importantly, a fact of life in Europe is that cash is king. Outside of hotels and major tourist attractions, American style credit cards are rarely accepted or just don’t work at all. A tremendous amount of my expenses during travel are paid in cash, so I don’t have that side of things itemized. What I do have is rather amazing, though.
First, I went to my German bank account and I pulled the totals for two big categories. The first is payments to eventim.de, the German ticket site that I use to buy my concert tickets. I only pulled payments for 2013, so this doesn’t include tickets that I bought late last year, like the Leonard Cohen ticket. It also doesn’t include tickets that I paid cash for, or tickets that someone else picked up, where I paid them back later. In 2013, I’ve spent at least €110 ($144.99) on concert tickets, but it was more likely two or three times that amount.
Next, I checked out what I’ve spent on Deutsche Bahn tickets so far this year. Once again, there are times that I paid cash for my tickets, so those numbers won’t show up here. However, any time I planned a trip in advance, I bought the tickets using my German bank account, so I have that total. In 2013, I’ve spent at least €932.30 ($1228.86) on train tickets. The majority of these tickets are at a 50% discount, because I have a BahnCard 50.
Next, I went to Mint.com to pull everything that I’ve categorized as travel in 2013. This doesn’t include my 2012 travel numbers, which were also sizeable.
The total on all of this is $13,096.05 from the US banking and $1,373.85 from the German banking.
This means that in 2013 alone, and only 2013, I have spent a grand total of more than $14,469.90 on travel. And that doesn’t even include cash spending, food, or local public transit passes.
It is possible to travel at much lower costs than this, of course- hostels, couch-surfing, and cheaper hotel alternatives are everywhere. Many cities have free tours that don’t cost what I spend on Skip-The-Line tours from Viator.com.
The thing is, I don’t care to travel more frugally. My time in Europe is finite- I won’t be out here forever. In another fourteen months, I’ll be back in the US. Once I’m back within those borders, it will be a while before I travel internationally again: there’s still too much I want to see within the United States.
While I’m here, though, I’m making the most of it. I want to see everything. Here, let Buzzfeed chime in on this:
How much do you spend a year on travel? Do you ever regret the expense?
This post might offend a few people, but this has been grinding my gears for a while.
Whenever I talk to people back in the US about the stuff I’ve done here, the places I’ve gone, the things I’ve seen, and the train rides to nearby cities and countries, a lot of them say, “you’re so lucky!”
I immediately want to stab them in the ear with a ball point pen. It’s not luck.
It’s not luck that got me to agree to sign two contracts, one in German and one in English, to stay here for three years. Luck had nothing whatsoever to do with my decision to pause my entire life back home for a then-uncertain time-frame while I came over here and did my company’s bidding. Luck didn’t get me to store my stuff, sell my car, and completely uproot my entire universe for a span of years.
Luck has nothing to do with missing three years of the lives of my family and friends. My newest niece will be four years old a month after I return. That’s 75% of her life so far. My parents are both in their 70s, with various competing health issues. My father has multiple myeloma in remission- he’s healthy right now, but there’s really no cure. I wonder often how much time I really have left with him, and I worry that I’m squandering it by living over here.
My friends back in the States have found significant others, moved in with one another, changed jobs, changed homes, moved between cities- time kicks along without me in it, and by the time I get back, the world I left will be irrevocably changed.
That ain’t luck, and it pisses me off immensely when people think it is.
I was talking recently with a local friend about all the travel that I do, and it became clear that she doesn’t travel. Not to the things that are just a few hours away, like Neuschwanstein or the Zugspitze. Not to slightly further places like London or Paris.
I asked if she wants to see those places, and she said “of course.” I asked why she hadn’t, and she was immediately full of rationalization- she always has boyfriends who don’t like to travel, for example.
My perspective is this: If you want to travel, you will travel.
If you want it badly enough, you’ll find a way to make it happen.
For years, I waited for the right combination of money, free time, and a good travel buddy. As I worked my way up in the company, my vacation time increased and time stopped being a problem. Then my salary got better, and suddenly I could afford to go places if I wanted to. I just had the lingering problem of needing a travel partner. I got my passport in 2006, thinking that I would be able to go to London soon. I just needed someone to travel with.
I wanted to see the city of London with someone I loved.
2006 became 2008, and my girlfriend at the time wanted to go with me. The timing was bad though. She had just started a new job, and she couldn’t take that sort of time off. She and I managed to take a few trips within the US, but we never left the country together.
If you look for a reason not to go, you will always find one.
Eventually, I figured out that if I wait around for a travel partner, I won’t ever go anywhere. I’m glad I realized that before I moved to Germany, because I’ve been to fourteen countries now, and I traveled to most of them entirely on my own.
If you really want to travel, you’ll travel.
Luck has nothing to do with it.
Do you want to travel?
The elevator at the hotel where I stayed in Paris was one of the strangest elevators I’ve ever seen in a hotel. There are no buttons inside the elevator except for the open and close door buttons. You select your destination on the panel outside the door, and then the little LCD screen on the top shows you which elevator will take you. When the elevator door opens, there’s a tiny set of lights showing which floor numbers that elevator will stop at.
Weird, but effective. Although sometimes that elevator got really full.
Have you ever been on an elevator with an unusual configuration?
Whimsy. Tacos. The DMV. 