Garmisch-Partenkirchen

 Dear Olympic Committee, Munich wants to try again, and this time it promises there will be no screw ups.  In its bid for the 2018 Winter Games, Munich has teamed up once again with Garmisch-Partenkirchen (a partnership that brought you such memorable events as the 1936 Olympics) with the best intentions of rewriting history, but has made the unfortunate mistake of settling on the slogan the Friendly Games.  As the city museum reminded us, Munich's last shot at redemption, the 1972 Olympics, took a page out of the same PR thesaurus and called itself the Happy Games.  You may remember what happened that time. If not, Steven Spielberg does.
    Poor marketing aside, Garmisch-Partenkirchen was a very nice resort, with a lot more going for it than Munich.  Munich was full of tourists and historic buildings under construction.  Garmisch-Partenkirchen may have had the tourists and outspokenly Anglo-hating Bavarians, but it also had the Alps.  No one would dare cover the Zugspitze, Germany's highest mountain, with one of those cloth awnings that reproduce the original facade of the heavily scaffolded building underneath and claim it was basically the same experience.  We also didn't have to deal with the world's most annoying English speakers turned bicycle tour guides once we headed deep into the Alpine woods.
  Sadly, judging from the treatment we received in one of the guesthouses we stopped at for a drink on our hike up one of the surrounding mountains (which started with a trail hacked through an extremely narrow gorge carved by a very close, very roaring stream), just because we didn't encounter any off-duty tour guides that weekend does not mean that said annoying Anglos have not already made it to Garmisch-Partenkirchen and ruined the reputation of English speakers everywhere.  Even German-speaking English speakers.  We got the slowest service, the wrong drinks, and general non-responsiveness to any and all requests (including to pay).  On the plus side, we got cold drinks on a patio after hiking halfway up a mountain.  Definitely not a complete loss.

Frühlingsfest

    While we all know about Octoberfest, apparently Germans can’t stop at one month-long incidence of public drunkenness,  because there is also Frühlingsfest, or Spring Festival which features just as much beer and much better weather.  A particularly large Frühlingsfest is held in Stuttgart about 5 minutes away from my apartment.  Throughout the day you can see girls dressed in dirndls and guys wearing lederhosen wandering out of the S-bahn station in the direction of the massive covered beer tents. 

    Mark had a work event at the beer tent, otherwise I don’t know that I would have gone.  First of all, I don’t have a dirndl.  It’s not an obligatory dress code – girls can also wear lederhosen, preferably short and skintight – but it is the preferred uniform of Frühlingsfest.  I thought that a dirndl would be the kind of thing rented out to couples with obnoxious heritage themed weddings,  like the Canadians who go all out for full Highland regalia.  It turns out that every German – and many visiting Europeans – has some traditional folk clothing tucked away in his or her closet.  You can get fancy velvet and linen embroidered dirndls that lace up with leather from a traditional clothier, you can buy cute cotton little-red-riding hood dirndls at the mall or you can get hot pink and black satin dirndls with miniskirts and fishnet cut-outs from a market stall.  It’s all a matter of taste. 

    The beer tents are massive and humid, with big long communal tables wedged together.  By 5PM on a Wednesday, nobody was sitting down; instead, the crowds of festively dressed teens were standing on the tables, dancing to the live band, and singing the words to every song.  Most songs had actions.  These people really took the whole concept of the YMCA-dance-along to heart.   The real shock was the litres of beer that these sixteen-year-olds were pouring back one after another.  We’re talking a Big Gulp of beer.  And not only could the kids hold them up above their heads and wave them at all the appropriate times in time with the music, but the waitresses could carry five of these extremely heavy, brimming mugs in each hand plus several trays of whole roasted chicken.   After three “prosits” my arm was already tired.  The beer was heavily watered down, but at the rate that it was being consumed,

   Like I said, this was a work outing.   Even after a few litres of beer, our table was the picture of decorum compared to surrounding parties.  We had a visit from a very happy Austrian with very bad balance who had undertaken an inadvisable, dangerous cross-table expedition.  There was some serious table dancing going on among a group of businessmen and women at an adjacent table that had us questioning exactly what kind of professionals they were.   By the end of the night (by which I mean by 10:30), we had learned a lot of the dances to such traditional German folk songs as John Denver’s Rocky Mountain High, and had also learned that under no circumstances should you use the bathrooms in a beer tent.   Just another cross-cultural success story.