It takes a special talent to go to Munich during the Oktoberfest, but not go TO the Oktoberfest. I plead guilty to it. In all truth, it’s not really, entirely, my doing. It all begins with the fact that I have a select few bands that I would like to see live at their own shown, outside of a festival setting. These bands also invariably seem to be too esoteric for Central European tastes, and with a few notable exceptions, do not play in Budapest. I have therefore become a frequent guest in the concert halls of Vienna and Berlin. When The National, who had been top of my wishlist for a while, announced their European dates, I was fresh off a visit to Berlin, so I decided to go wild, and buy tickets to their Munich show. What could possibly go wrong?

A while later I revisited the project only to realise they would be playing on October 1^st. With a sinking feeling in my stomach, I googled the dates of Oktoberfest 2023, and was faced with the horror: this would be the last weekend, extended by two days this year, to ‘absorb’ the long weekend leading to the October 3^rd bank holiday, the day of German Reunification. My stomach sank further when I saw the prices for accommodation, and even further when I realised plane tickets from Budapest to Munich are prohibitively expensive- only Lufthansa flies the route, but they are evidently focusing on transfer passengers- a flight to Italy with a stopover in Munich can cost less than a direct ticket to either destination. This left us with the option of the seven and a half hours journey by train, which meant being at the whims of the dynamic duo of horror known as the Deutsche Bahn and MÁV. (I leave the Austrians out of it: they seem to run a well-oiled operation through jaw dropping Alpine sceneries, only to be foiled by their nemeses at both ends of the line.)

As a final nail in the coffin of the ‘National in Munich operation’, I didn’t feel all that positively inclined towards Munich, and as ever so often with weak minded football fans, the local team was to blame. All my German friends and acquaintances seemed to hate Bayern, so much so that one of the very first German expressions I ever learned was (excuse my German) ‘Scheissverein’, which is basically just a shit club. Not in terms of results, but as a vibe, and in my mind the bad vibe extended to the whole city. Yet I wanted to see The National so much that I decided to plow through notwithstanding. And thank heavens I did.

The omens started to turn positive when I managed to find decently priced accommodation about ten days before the show, which seems to be the way to go with visiting Munich during the Oktoberfest: either book ridiculously early, or ridiculously late, when hotels will release any unsold rooms at considerably lower prices. True, the Bento Inn was far from the centre, and it turned out to be surrounded by an eclectic neighbourhood, in the Messe area: it contained a sleepy village, a big field which was being meticulously mowed by a local on the Monday morning, many warehouses, many more hotels, a few strip clubs and a gay sauna that also seemed to deliver bathroom appliances to your home. The check in system was not really prepared for the Oktoberfest onslaught, and the personnel was unfazed to slightly amused by the sight of Italians and Spaniards clutching their nicely packed dirndls and lederhosen in an endless queue which was slowly swallowing itself like an ouroboros. Thus, we learned that the Oktoberfest is incredibly popular in Italy, and not as much in northern, German speaking regions, but much more in the south. The Bento Inn crowd had arrived from the Naples area and was vibrating with excitement at the idea of getting drunk in a tent. But ultimately the Bento was clean, comfortable, and quiet enough, which is everything we wanted, given the circumstances.

We spent a lot of our first day in the metro- so I do have to mention that metro signage in Munich is not up to German standards of precision, but then again, we were just getting adjusted to the fact that this is Bavaria, with all its special quirks. And this quirky city was slowly but surely growing on us. Every so often, when I am in a new city, I struggle to find things at first, such as a good restaurant on day one, when you are very likely famished after the trip. In Munich I stared at the map and saw that there are plenty of restaurants in the Munchner Freiheit area, I liked the name, so we went there, and we found a great hamburger place in no time. The weather was splendid, warm, and sunny, the city was looking forward to the bank holidays, people in dirndls and lederhosen were roaming around merrily with bottles of beer in their hands- in fact, everybody, at every hour, everywhere, seemed to have a bottle or a can of beer in their hand. I felt no urge whatsoever to visit the Oktoberfest itself, although we were in its close proximity several times, but I thoroughly enjoyed how it cast its afterglow on the entire city- sure, there will always be a few people who can’t handle their drink and become a nuisance, but generally speaking this was a well behaved crowd, buzzed just as much as is needed in order to have a fine old time.

On the second day, we indulged in gloriously touristy pass-times, including souvenir shopping in a tacky store called The Little Bavaria, shopping which included beer mugs and pretzel shaped fridge magnets, and I have no shame whatsoever in admitting this. We’d started with having excellent coffee in a hipster den Germanically named Man Versus Machine, and then went on to have more coffee and pretzels at a stand at the Viktualienmarkt, where I studied the locals spreading butter over their fresh pretzels, and I am now obsessed with this luxurious lifestyle. The blog’s industrious co-photographer has a famous talent, of finding and desperately wanting the most expensive item in any store or market, so he duly identified a brand of expensive Austrian schnapps, sold in Swarovski glass bottles. Another one of his talents is to identify a tower to be climbed, and there it was, Saint Peter’s Church, the ‘Alter Pater’, as it is known to locals, and he basically ran up the stairs and then questioned all his life choices once he arrived, breathless, on top. The staircase is one of those narrow affairs where you have to negotiate the climb with people moving from the opposite direction, in a never-ending echo of ‘dankes’ and ‘bittes’. Once on top, the guides tell you, you will see a splendid panorama of the city, and they also tell you what to be on the lookout for, such as the Neues Rathaus, right across the Marienplatz, and so people will unavoidably arrive and scan the horizon for the stadium. Allianz-u-arena!, screamed the absolutely ecstatic Korean kid to my right. I knew he was Korean because both him and his dad were sporting lovely, recently released Bayern third kits with Min-Jae’s name on it and the mum, slightly amused by it all, was taking pictures of their beaming faces. (We soon found the Bayern emporium on Weinstrasse, it’s a many floored affair teeming with mostly male, foreign shoppers, excited as famished Labradors about the several floors of Bayern branded everything.)

Our ramblings later took us to the English Gardens, which we expected to be a pleasant city park. We weren’t necessarily ready for surfers- but surfers are what we found on the Eisbach, an artificial river which flows through the gardens and into the Isar. Most surfers congregate at a standing wave nearby the Haus der Kunst museum, though we spotted another group farther up in the gardens as well. Eisbach means ice brook in German, aptly so, as the water never warms above 15 degrees. A fact which, alongside the brook having a very strong current, does not stop people from swimming in it- while swimming is theoretically forbidden, authorities are lax on imposing the ban. As such, on the day of our visit, people were merrily rolling in the shallow waters. By this time the blog’s industrious co-photographer had long been obsessing about sausages, so made a pit stop at the Biergarten Am Chinesischen Turm. Here, German efficiency kicks in with a vengeance: you enter a labyrinth of stands, each of them dedicated to a type of food: sausages, half chickens, side dishes, salads, and pastry, followed by the unavoidable beer counters, one of which is exclusively dedicated to the Mass- the one litre receptacle which would probably break my wrist if I were to lift it. At the end of this hunter-gatherer quest, you end up with a tray of assorted food and drinks, pay at a cash desk and are ejected into the beer garden itself, an endless maze of tables and benches. You could call it fast food, only nobody eats fast: once seated at your table, you will likely nurse your beers for hours, with merriment and noise levels surging and ebbing all around. It may have been the weather, the Oktoberfest, the bank holiday or the strong whiff of fish around the Viktualienmarkt, or all of them together, but Munich felt much more like a Mediterranean city than a stern Germanic affair.

I wasn’t let down on one stereotypical thing, though: the sound at the venue, the Zenith, was impeccable, as sound systems at German concerts tend to be. And The National, on this tour, are in one of the finest forms of their lives. The set is a smorgasbord of pleasures, both hits, and lesser-known tracks raided from their back catalogue. They also scramble the set quite thoroughly from one show to the other, so you are left with an excited anticipation of what is to come next. It’s a long show, too, over two hours, yet they seem to blaze by. In no time, we were spilled into another Alpine village looking area of town- it happens a lot in Munich, to suddenly move from a busy part of town to what looks like the backdrop to the Sound of Music. And then I was sat on the metro with a stupid, delighted grin. And then a couple of days later, back on my living room sofa in Budapest, I found myself willing Thomas Müller to make something of those dribbles, have Bayern score. Munich may have charmed me into turning into a monster. So be it, then.