Oktoberfilth

I thought I knew filth after a 20-something-hour, sweaty flight from Sydney to Munich followed by an even sweatier struggle around the city trying to find my hotel for the first night that left me feeling greasier than a hormonal 15-year-old’s face. Five days later, I realised I could not be more wrong about filth.

To understand the true nature of filth one has had to see James Roche after five days of camping and slugging beers for the better part of his waking hours. One must gaze upon his wan and slack-jawed face and admire the texture of the crusty stains on his shorts unprotected by underpants. One must  experience the body-blow of stink that emanates from him so intensely that a hardened rugby league grub dry-retched that fateful fifth-day morn when The Burger emerged from his musty tent and into the daylight. This is true filth.

The filth

From my comfortable hotel bed I foresaw none of this. Greeted with complimentary champagne and a dressing gown I want to call a Eurobe, but which might well have just been not designed for the taller gentleman, I did what any sensible person in a new city does; ate a roast pork knuckle and slept 16 hours to defeat jet lag in one fell swoop.

As a poorly organised individual and due to the popular nature of Oktoberfest, the only consistent accommodation I had been able to secure for my stay in Bavaria was a tent in a camping ground run by Stoke Travel who, judging by their preview emails, clearly ran a demure and family friendly establishment. I was not terribly concerned by this. What did concern me was that due to my above average poor organisation, I had been too slow to book a safe and cosy 1-man tent, and instead had ½ of a two man tent. Given the size of two-man tents and the possibility for any manner of tent-buddy, I was slightly anxious about the potential for a smelly, cramped mess.

My fears were unwarranted as I ended up in the single-man tee pee (or man-pee), a large, well-aired 8-sleeper with the affable Andreas (The Spicy Jalapeno), a German-speaking parole officer from Washington DC. I tried to locate the Burger who had arrived a day earlier, but with none of his contact numbers working it was a merry scamper around various tents before I stumbled across him where I should have been looking all along: at the all-day bar slugging piss at 11a.m.

The man-pee

With him was a man somehow stockier, Gaps, and with these two and Andreas, a nucleus of filth and drunken excess was born. Following some celebratory we’ve-arrived-at-Oktoberfest-and-found-each-other campsite drinks, we headed into the fest where in a worryingly short space of time we each ploughed through four or so steins.

The crew (me, Gaps, The Burger, The Spicy Jalapeno

At one litre capacity and weighing probably close to two kilos, the stein is an impressive receptacle. More impressive are the powerful arms of the waitresses, straining against the sleeves of their Dirndl as they carry up to 10 of them.

To drink these refreshments one has to first find a seat at a small, sticky table, into which the process of wedging oneself can be quite difficult if anyone else is sitting there. Those with foresight try to hold an end seat so that the inevitable excursions to the bathrooms are more easily achieved. Unless you have a perch at a table, you won’t be served.

From 12pm an old-school German band plays strange drinking songs in every hall to which the crowds sing lustily along, and every now and then people get very excited when some brave soul stands atop their table and attempts to skol their stein, success at which is met with applause worthy of a conquering hero.

That first day we stumbled back to camp where I promptly passed out in the man-pee before waking up around 9pm to rejoin the campsite bar and lay waste to some more beverages.

Subsequent days followed a similar pattern, only with increasingly miserable hangovers and fewer mid-evening passings out.

The exception was day two, where we tried to get into the ‘fest but apparently it was “Italian Saturday” or somesuch, which meant that there were enormous queues for every beer hall and carabinieri assisting the local politzie because of the glut of boozed-up Italians.

With no desire to queue indefinitely—we later found out that the trick was the bribe the security guards with 30 euros, although then you still had to find a seat at a table—we decided to embark on our own mini pub crawl around the centre of Munchen after a hearty Bavarian lunch of variously roasted or boiled meats with spongy dumplings and viscous gravy. Joining us today was a small Canadian man who looked like Judd Apatow. Despite weighing barely half of any of the other four of us, he went beer for beer all day, even downing some shots of Jagermeister, before finally cracking on the walk home as he dribbled a steady stream of vomit which slowly crusted on his impressive, woodsy beard.

Gaps and Judd Apatow

That night we met Shultzy, an Australian man at the campsite who accused Gaps of having pissed on his face the night before after crash tackling him into a tent. Gaps did not dispute the charges, and in his own special way of making it up, took a poo in shoe to demonstrate to Shultzy that he wasn’t such a bad guy.

This impressed Schultzy enough for him to start a chant in Gaps’ honour, ‘Mad cunt, mad cunt, mad cunt!’

The owner of the campsite had a moped on which he scooted around constantly, checking up on the state of his grounds and the drunken debauchery that threatened to render the earth scorched and uninhabitable thereafter. We later bore witness to a video of a drunken Schultzy roaring around on this same moped, having somehow Shang-hai’d it.

Other memorable campsite moments include drunkenly berating two young Australian guys into beer-bonging to excess, eating vending machine hot chips, having people come over to Gaps in reverence and ask him about shoe-pooing, and generally drinking to excess with a bunch of similarly minded people.

At the tables at Oktoberfest the beer flows endlessly and it gets progressively more crowded as the afternoon wears on. In the cramped conditions it is hard not to become amicable with your neighbours. By far our favourite drinking companion was an American called Conway, aka The Big C, who looked like a cross between Meatloaf and Neil Diamond. With also a touch of Jabba the Hut and well beyond his best years, this smooth talking yank, once he realised we were a pack of filthy humanbeings, took us into confidence and thereon maintained a steady running commentary of lasciviousness as he scanned the hall for buxom broads and recounted tales of grubbiness past.

Me and The Big C

I like to think that we left him with a tale. Cramped in the middle of the table with nowhere to go, The Burger was forced to fill a stein with his light golden urine. Placing this in a collection of used steins on another table, he assumed a comely bar wench would rustle it away into a washing machine. This did not happen.

A fellow reveller, spotting this stein, decided it must’ve been hers and filled with delicious white wine—the only non-beer option available—and proceeded to drink deeply. With wrinkled face, she then spat it out. We thought the ordeal was done, but it wasn’t.

She went back for more.

The Burger had filled this stein with a sizeable 0.5L of sweet piss, apparently so sweet that this woman thought it was just funky tasting white wine. After polishing off most of the stein, she poured in more white wine, and continued sipping away.

I thought that this, or perhaps Burger’s stench, would be the most unsavoury experience of my five days.

On the second last day the Burger and I celebrated our final stint in the beer halls by embarking on a sausage crawl back to the bus that would take us to the campsite. Four cabanossi and two bratwursts later we were there, and proceeded to finish the evening in standard style with a few quiet drinkies.

At four a.m. I felt a terrible rumbling and was getting quite a lot of cabanossi on the burp. After an indecent rush to the bathroom, I thought I had escaped this terrible scourge, before I felt round two a-coming. A hasty retreat to the bathroom saw a cascade of rancid filth explode out of me, only to have the stench of this terribleness catalyse a mutual explosion from my other end. Purging dynamically, I thought the end was nigh as I tried to keep my feet out of this chamber of horrors before stumbling out into the early morning where I attempted to wipe clean what little dignity remained in my body and throughout my soul.

The Burger, Gaps and I left that campsite very much worse for wear. The stink on the train ride to the Munich airport left adjacent grandmas politely gagging, and with every slight shudder my tender insides threatened to wreak further damage.

At last this salubrious trio parted ways, Burger and Gaps with a bottle of shower gel to the airport showers, and bowels aquiver I to my plane to Berlin. It was a harrowing, if memorable Oktoberfest.