Oktoberfest Review

Party shirt, party beer, party sunglasses. check check and check.

Dear friends, readers, and future self,

Here is an online scrapbook of my experience at Oktoberfest. It was everything I hoped it would be and more. Note that I have a beer in my hand in every picture. That's because I drank copious amounts of beer at Oktoberfest, just as I predicted.

18 year old German Mike Weinert

We began our day in the Hofbräu tent, one of 14 main tents setup on the Oktoberfest grounds. Apparently people who attend beer drinking festivals are really serious about drinking and because of this, we had to show up at 8 am just to get into the tent. My party shirt wearing friend and I were actually the last ones to be let in so we got shafted and ended up sitting in the corner of the tent with a bunch of German teenage welders. A good recipe for some hot gay German porn.

After one beer though things ended up being cool and we learned that Germans like to toast and sing a lot. Pretty much every stereotype you can think of about Germans is true at Oktoberfest except everyone is much friendlier and accepting of everything. EVERY German dude wears leiderhosen and EVERY German woman wears dirndls...or however you spell it...the dresses that push their chesticles together. I've never been really into boobs but those dresses definitely added points to the otherwise plain faces I saw...hey-oooo.

Beers, bros, balconies, bitches...behind the camera.

This is myself and Jerry O'Connell at another tent...I think it was called the Winzerer Fahndl. German names of things are even funnier than Dutch names of things.

At this point I was confident enough to sit on a balcony ledge that was a good 20 ft up. This part of the day is really really hazy...I'm glad my friends brought this camera to document my brush with death.

Sobriety

This is about the halfway point. There were many highs and lows during the first day. I would have to classify this part as a low...a really low low. In this picture we had decided to "take a break" from the Oktoberfest festivities by going to the grocery store and buying lots of beer.

That. Just. Happened. This buxom German-looking girl just got served.

This is much much later on in the night. My energy was restored after about 10 more beers and I was able to serve this girl up something fierce.

Total drinking time on this day = 18 hours

The next day I got up and did it all again until my flight that night. I have been recovering ever since, but it was well worth it.

Drunk Monkeys

A lot of you have been demanding a post about drunk monkeys. Well, your wishes have come true.

Oktoberfest

Finally, I get to see what the big stank is about. I am leaving tonight for what I'm pretty sure will prove to be a fruitful weekend of beer drinking and intelligent decisions. I just found a hotel yesterday which is pretty awesome (I'm guessing they don't call it Hotel Nymphenburg for nothing...or maybe they do because they are German and that could be a very common name there having nothing to do with fornicating). Anway, I don't have to sleep in a compact Euro car like I thought I would. It should be good times.

Reflections on Amsterdam

1) If you crossed a snooty British person with an angry Ayatollah and put said person into a service situation, you would get better service from this fictional human than 99% of Dutch customer service reps I have come across...the exceptions are a gay Dutch bartender and a Chilean waitress...so I guess she isn't an exception.

Dutch customer service blizows. When you are not being ignored you are being yelled at.

I have never gone somewhere before and offered to put money in someone's pocket in exchange for them retrieving something for me and had them get angry with me. Until I went to the corner restaurant and tried to order some soup. Or went to the coffee shop and asked for a menu...or waited in line for 20 minutes for my bike to be fixed only to get to the front and have the guy say it is 4:30 and he is closed for the day and I must be crazy for offering to give him money at this time of night.

2) Amsterdam is a pretty town, best seen by boat...preferably by dinghy and using a tourist map to get around the system of canals.
3) Dutch girls...or should I say Amsterdam girls put the "c(o)unt" in country. They are frigid ice queens.

4) Biking is sweet. biking blackout drunk at 3am with a thing of takeout noodles in one hand is not intelligent. No one wears helmets here on their bikes which is cool with me...however, I have seen some ridiculously stupid shit when it comes to people carrying babies around on their bikes. The most recent one being a guy riding his bike and simultaneously carring his baby zipped up in his hoodie. The odds on that baby making it to 3 years old are really stacked against him.

5) It is really fucking expensive...especially when you are paid in weak ass dollars. I was wondering why I spent so much money in one weekend so I refrained from blacking out one night the next weekend. I learned that I had been spending 8 euros per beer. That's the opposite of cool.

6) Amsterdamers (Amsterdamites?) and Dutch people in general speak English at my proficiency level. Possibly better. Dutch is basically like their own secret language they made up just to piss me off. Every other sentence I swear I know what they are saying and then they throw in some word with ten too many vowels and a pirate sounding "aarrrrr" and I am thrown for a loop once again.

7) It is the least private city ever. You can walk around and peer into people's living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms at all hours, day and night. I can look out my front window and see directly into another apartment which never bothers to close its drapes. Too bad it's the home of some old couple.

What I Have Been Up To While Not Posting II

- drinking
- smokin (snortin, shootin - not really these two but I like that part of black sheep)
- buying a boat
- not smoking cigarettes
- spending euros, that's right, plural
- living in the former attic of an apartment building
- trying to get rid of the massive amount of change in my pockets at all times
- buying a bike
- walking up three flights of death stairs followed by one flight of ladder stairs four times a day
- trying to shop for food for myself again
- contemplating buying a european carryall (man purse) for all my change
- buying a "tobacco" smoking device
- being cold in august - dutch weather sucks
- staring at my computer too much
- planning a trip to poland
- cruising the canals in aforementioned boat
- getting the shittiest customer service of my life
- constantly being amazed at how dutch people speak better english than 90% of americans (possibly including myself)
- watching american football (we bought the extra sports package with nasn)
- getting scoffed at by ice queen dutch girls
- trying to hate this song. I haven't succeeded yet
- not doing laundry for 4 weeks
- planning where I will sleep at oktoberfest (probably in a rental car shared with three other people)
- deliberately buying the gayest sounding item on the menu at the coffee shop
- trying to stop listening to this song. probably played out in the states by now.
- riding my bike in the shitty dutch weather
- meeting with cartoon-like japanese executives
- planning a trip to stockholm
- getting stoned (not in the middle ages sense)
- binge drinking in moderation (only on the weekends)

Last Days of Thailand

My last days in Thailand are quite a blur. This is probably a good thing given that I would like to forget a lot of what transpired.

All in all though, I will miss Thailand. I must say that I think I really hit my stride in the final weekend/week. I bought a basketball and balled with the local Bangkokians, finally feeling more at home and not just like some guest in a hotel. My Thai and game spitting ability to Thai girls who speak very little english peaked. I basically got to the point where Thai people believed I spoke Thai and that I was lying to them when I said I couldn't. I even went on a date with a Thai girl who didn't speak English and it was enjoyable. I still felt a little like I was hanging out with a crow but at least this crow could show me around her nest. Pun intended. If crows actually have nests...

I am still trying to piece together the final night in Bangkok. I will probably have to write a separate blog about it, since it is quite blogworthy. However, I will say now that it ended in me getting maybe 30 minutes of sleep and leaving for the airport very late for my flight...I spent the first half of my 10 hour flight to Helsinki in a drunken sleep. Then I woke up, ate, popped a xanzibar and spent the rest of the flight drooling on my shoulder. As luck would have it I sat directly next to a really hot Finnish girl who wanted nothing to do with me and the alcohol seeping out of my pores.

Anyway, I have arrived in Amsterdam and it is nothing like Bangkok. I feel like I'm living in the countryside. If the countryside had a faint smell of weed and a lot of extremely tall people riding bikes everywhere.

I live in an apartment on a street called Plantage Muidergracht. It is just down the street from the Artis Zoo and the Waterloopen. Just a stones throw away from Stadhouderskade and Utrechtsestraat. I hear it is really quite a lovely place to live. Much better than Spiegelkwartier.

PS - names of things here are hilarious.

Lazy Post

Good Links that I have come across recently:
http://help.com/post/124066-funny-metaphors-used-in-high-school

http://www.kottke.org/08/08/good-brendan-fraser-movies
Note: this is wildly inaccurate as neither Encino Man nor Airheads are mentioned

http://www.rooshv.com/2008/my-philosophy-on-life

http://withleather.uproxx.com/post.phtml?pk=6567

And my favorite:



PS get these albums if you don't already have them:
Lil Wayne - Tha Carter III
MGMT - Oracular Spectacular

I am counting down the days to Amsterdam...