Oktoberfest!

There really aren't words to describe how awesome it was to finally experience Oktoberfest tonight. It was incredible. GWAVA had reserved us a whole section of tables inside of the Ochsenbraterei beer house. In this single beer house there must have been 10,000 people singing and dancing and drinking and just generally having a good time. It was just an awesome atmosphere to be in.

I ended up at a table with Dirk, Morris, Sundy, Svetlin and several German customers and Novell consultants. Surprisingly, I even remember their names (although I have no idea whether or not I'm spelling them correctly): Rieser, Sacha, Frank, Griet and Arno. It was a pretty good table to be at.

The good thing about being at a beer festival with a bunch of people from Provo is that you are bound to find a few extra drink tickets. GWAVA provided everyone with tickets for 2 free beers. I think that I ended up with about 8 free beers... although I ended up sharing the wealth with several other people. Rand may disagree with here, but I think that 8 litres of beer is just too much for any one man to drink in a single night.

I'm proud to admit that I was the first person in the GWAVA group to stand on the table and start dancing :) It became increasingly common over the course of the night and by the end pretty much everyone was doing it. It's actually a pretty natural thing to do. The benches are so crowded that to get some air you either need to climb over a bunch of people to get out or you just stand up. Of course once you are standing you have no choice but to dance.

The music was really interesting. As you might expect, they played a number of traditional Bavarian songs, but then they also played a bunch of American songs as well. Things like, "In the Jungle" (the Aweemaway song), John Denver's "West Virginia", and even some more recent music like 4 Non Blondes, "What's Going On". It was really bizarre to be sitting in a beer house in Germany surrounded by a bunch of Germans belting out John Denver while standing on the tables. You just can't put a price on an experience like that :)

So, I was frequently standing on my table and even hanging from the rafters a couple of times. This drew a little bit of attention to myself and made me the subject of quite a few peoples photos. I think that it was particularly amusing for some of the conference attendees who had been in my sessions over the last couple of days and recognized me as a Novell employee.

Unfortunately, I didn't get many pictures of my own craziness. I'll have to wait for some people to send me their pictures. Svetlin, Dirk, Morris, Mark (from GWAVA) and Danita got plenty of pictures that I'm hoping to have sent to me.

Because we started drinking at about 5 in the evening, I was feeling pretty good by about 9:30 and decided that it was time to head back to the hotel. It was a little bizarre to end the night so early but there just wasn't much more beer that I could have forced into myself without risking being sick. So, Dirk and I walked back to the hotel together in the rain.

After a short drunken call to Rosey (I'm sure that she was amused) I drifted off to sleep at about 10:30. I didn't even bother getting inside of my bed. I just passed out right on top of it. Now the funny thing is that my body has grown so accustomed to a lack of sleep that I was wide awake at 5 and a half hours later at 4 in the morning. I've been up for a couple of hours now blogging and im'ing. In a few more hours, I'll pack everything up and jump on a train to the airport to come home. This has been an incredible trip, but I definitely think that I'm ready to be home. Having this much fun can really wear a guy out :)