After a lovely 13 hour sleep – which probably would have been more but John’s phone alerted us to Tom’s birthday at 9am!

Today was a pretty non-scripted day. Main objective – see the keg tapping at Oktoberfest.

We metro’ed to the Central Station, and followed the signs to the festivities!

There was a parade to kick off the day – it was all the tent owners on horse drawn carts with barrels of their beer!

I was pretty surprised at the amount of “pre-gaming” on the street. Seemed everyone had a bottle of beer. More humorous was the pile right before the entrance and on a different day a set of little old people collecting the empties near the entrance – pretty smart!

We eventually figured out that we should circle around the parade and get into the fest in time to see the keg tapping. We got into the sea of people and shimmied forward through the gates.

We got hung up a bit with the crowd and with some of the carts stopping to drop off their beir, And then i heard it, the tell tale cannon blast to indicate it was officially open. So we missed it, but it was fun to be there on the first day!

We looked around, took a circle through the Paulaner tent, looked at the food options, found our tent for monday and then decided it was time for lunch!

We hooked up with Suman and Pramilla for some lunch at one of the oldest beer houses – Augastiner!

We didn’t have reservations so we ended up in the “basement” – which was AWESEOME!

Pamilla and I each picked the pork and dumplings with a fried egg, and Suman and John got a spicy sausage (devil sausage) and some potato salad! We also started with the obatz – omg, i’m addicted to this stuff…  so delicious!

Pro tip – if there is a basket of pretzels on the table – you are charged per one eaten!

After our wonderful lunch we headed to see the Asam church made by 2 brothers that was above and beyond. Similar to the hidden church in amsterdam, this place was small but all the different architectural types were used and it was insanely decorated!

We did some shopping to have accessories for our outfits for monday! I got a purple rose band for my hair and a bracelet with interchangeable buttons!

Next up was another staple of Munic – Hofbrauhaus!

We walked in and took the first seat we found, grabbed a seat, some weisbeir, a pretzel and enjoyed looking around and the oompapa band!

We called it a night after that to get ready for our trip to the castle the next day!