Oktoberfest

I had a whopping three days of class this week- it still feels like I’m on a vacation in Europe! Did I mention that two of the days I don’t start until 1pm? I’m living my best life over here. I still really like the classes I chose too. I have yet to befriend any Irish people though which is shocking! I thought for sure I’d meet some in my Marine and Ocean Politics class because only 5 visiting students were allowed to register, but I ended up accidentally sitting between a girl from the US and a guy from France (what are the ODDS). I also tried joining the sailing and squash clubs in hopes of meeting Irish people but squash meets during my mandatory ND class on Wednesday nights and sailing meets on Friday afternoons and I just won’t ever be in Galway on a Friday. I did join the Marine Science Society though so there is still hope!

Now for the more exciting part of the update: going to Germany this weekend! Our flight was at 6am on Friday morning, but Una and I don’t have Thursday classes and Claire only has one in the morning so we decided to have a nice lunch in Galway and then took the bus to Dublin to explore around there for the rest of the afternoon! We met up with Catherine, Leah, and Andrew and they showed us around for a bit. I ~napped~ at Leah’s apartment on campus at Trinity because we had to take the 3:30am bus to the airport which was so painful (but better than the 1:30am bus from Galway I guess…). I knew some other ND kids were going to Oktoberfest this weekend, but when we rolled up to the bus stop at 3:30am there must have been 30 other ND kids. We were all on the same flight which made it a little more bearable.

I could not sleep on the flight so I was exhausted by the time we landed in Munich- obviously had to rally though! Goodness gracious navigating subways in America is difficult but it’s ten times worse when none of the signs are in English. We eventually made it to our Airbnb though to drop off our bags. It was only about 10 min from the city center (by subway) and the stop was right by the apartment so it was perfect! We headed straight for the city center after that in search of drindls, soft pretzels, and any touristy things we could do (we spent so long planning the flights/accommodations but we didn’t even think to look at what to actually do in Munich- definitely a lesson learned here for only having such a short amount of time to explore). The first thing we saw getting off the subway at Marienplatz (the city center) was City Hall. It’s a beautiful building but we were confused as to why there were thousands of people ready to take pictures and videos with their smartphones. That was when the clock struck 12 and all of a sudden the bells started ringing and for lack of a better term the ‘statues’ started moving around in circles in the tower. It was cool to watch- I’m glad we stumbled upon that! From there we had lunch at a German cafe and then it was off to find drindls. We walked through a ton of pop up shops but they were all so expensive to only wear for one day. We wandered into an H&M though because they had drindls in their window display and honestly it was the best place we had found! All five of us got our own unique drindl and they were only 50 euro (still kinda a lot but WORTH IT!). They looked way better than some of the other really touristy ones we had passed. After that we wandered around the city exploring a bit more and then met up with some of the ND kids from Dublin and London at a beirgarten- it’s so fun being able to meet up with people from different programs that I’m friends with but wouldn’t necessarily plan a trip with. That night we got nice and cozy fitting all five of us in a double bed and couch- but we didn’t sleep for long anyways because we had to set our alarms for 5am to get in line!

In reality, we snoozed our alarms for a good 45 minutes- we just couldn’t get up. We eventually made a feast for breakfast and suited up in our drindls and were in line for oktoberfest by 7am. The gates didn’t open until 9am and the first keg is ceremonially tapped at 12pm so it was a longgg day of waiting. None of us bothered bringing jackets to Germany because every day it was 70 and sunny during normal hours of the day but oh man at 7am it was 40 degrees and we were in line under the shade of trees for two hours and I have never been so cold in my entire life- life lesson number two of the trip! At 9am the security guards opened the gates and it was an absolute mad house. Everyone was SPRINTING to get a table at the tent they wanted- I honestly don’t even know what to compare it to. It was like a Black Friday / renaissance fair mash up. It was absolutely terrifying. We all miraculously managed to stick together though AND run into more Notre Dame people so we managed to get TWO tables in the main tent and filled them to maximum capacity with ND kids. We then took shifts of manning the table so that everyone could explore the grounds over the 3 hours we had to kill. It was wild- basically the largest carnival I have ever seen. There were rides everywhere and so many stands selling all different types of foods and touristy things. Closer to 12 there was a huge parade on the grounds to kick off the festival. After a while we started going around to different beer halls: the day was filled with lots of soft pretzels, steins, and hearing the German song Ein Prosit every 10 minutes. It was also REALLY entertaining that random people would stand up on the tables and attempt to chug their entire steins and if they do it it’s so impressive and they get a round of applause by thousands of people but if they are too slow everyone starts throwing food at them and security kicks them out of the tent! Oktoberfest was absolutely crazy I’m so glad I went but also that was definitely a one and done type of thing. Although we had grand plans, none of us made it up late enough to watch the ND vs Georgia game (I guess it was for the best because we lost…. but barely).

Sunday morning it was back to Galway- such a quick trip to Munich! Ryan Air is on my list now though…. The line to check in took almost an hour and we were then informed that we had to have our boarding passes printed instead of using the passes on our phones because we don’t live in Ireland. So we had to get into a completely separate line and pay TWENTY EURO to print our boarding passes. But oh wait- that was just the line to pay we needed to go back to the first line to actually have the pass printed. There was no way we could wait in that line again so we forced our way to the front and they thankfully printed our passes pretty quickly. By the time we made it through security our flight was 3/4 of the way boarded- we justtttt made it. A little too close for comfort even though we were at the airport over two hours before our flight. Life lesson number three of the trip: always print boarding passes for BOTH ways on Ryan Air and never cut it any closer than two hours for international flights. I don’t even know where I’m supposed to find a printer in all these different countries for my return flights though but Ryan Air has a “deal” where if you pay the 4 euro to select your seat it comes with early check in so I can print passes for both ways while I’m still at school- definitely worth it I think (I’m still mad they could charge 20 euro- they are really capitalizing on their captive audience…). Anyways, I was so jealous of Catherine and Katie because they both got to take a 20 min bus ride back to their apartment but Claire, Una and I had a 3 hour bus ride ahead of us (honestly incredible that I can cross the entire country in 3 hours though). By the time I got back I was EXHAUSTED and called it a night very early.