One Night in Bavaria
It all started on a
Thursday afternoon in Germany. I had just taken the train from
Berlin to Regensburg, and Melanie, her new guy Kilian, and her friend
Christina picked me up from the station. We walked around
Regensburg the rest of the afternoon – what a great old town.
There is a beautiful, huge, Gothic cathedral there and lots of great
medieval streets and squares. We had dinner in one such square,
and then decided to go to a festival that they were having that night
in Regensburg. The festival was just like a state fair in the
U.S., except cleaner and with better lighting.
There was one big difference
though: the fair had all these massive beer tents. We
walked into one of them and it was like stepping into this great
Bavarian anthropological case study. Imagine at least a thousand
Bavarian people in a massive tent, all sitting at picnic tables
drinking really tasty, really strong beer out of HUGE one-liter
mugs. The waitresses wore the traditional Bavarian dresses called
diendls, which made them look just like the St. Pauli girl. And
there was this cheesy German band there that is sort of a local party
band — everyone in southern Germany knows them. They were
singing both traditional German songs and pop songs. But it
wasn’t just the waitresses – lots of the women wore diendls also, and
there were lots of men in lederhosen, the traditional leather pants
from that area. I’m telling you, it was like some kind of
German-stereotype fantasyland that Melanie and her friends had put
together just for me! And no other Americans to be found!
We found ourselves a table in middle
of the revelry and ordered ourselves a few mas’s, (mas = 1 liter mug of
beer). The band would play a few traditional songs and a few pop
songs – lots of 80s numbers – and everyone sang along.
There were lots of toasts.
Funny, I don’t remember what most of them were, although I do remember
that we made friends with the folks next to us, which of course
necessitated many more toasts. I really like the way the Germans
do toasts. You say “Proust” (rhymes with “roost”), clink your
flagon, tap it on the table (to calm the sloshing after all that
clinking), and drink. Except they have this great rule:
when you knock glass with someone, you have to look them in the eye or
you are condemned to seven years of bad sex. It totally changes
the character of a toast, making it more personal and just… a lot
better, even in the middle of really chaotic revelry such as this.
Anyway, before we knew it, everyone
was standing, dancing, and even jumping on the picnic benches and
singing along at the top of their lungs. Beer sloshing around,
lots of it going down the hatch. Good times. We took a few
good pictures. We took a lot of blurry pictures. Oh, and
remember the song from about 1983 by Nena, called “99 Red
Balloons”? Well, when the band started playing this one, the
place went freaking crazy.
I had 2 Mas’s in about an hour… which I was regretting later. But overall, it was SO MUCH FUN.