Sometimes other people will try to ruin it for you.
My trip to Munich was the first trip I planned for my time abroad. I booked it almost as soon as I knew that I would be studying in Paris. I spent a lot of money, not being a seasoned traveler and not knowing that staying at a hostel would be better than at a hotel.
So, we checked into the Holiday Inn, which was a short metro ride to the festival grounds. On our first day at Oktoberfest, we all went pretty hard, screaming “prost” everytime we purchased a new beer, standing on the tables chugging our steins and stuffing our faces with delicious German food.
Our group took up almost an entire section of the Hofbraus Haus tent and that angered a few people. I ended up exchanging some words with a Swedish man. Him and his friends (there were only four of them), were angry that we were sharing a table with them. At Oktoberfest there is usually a sense of camaraderie between the people attending, but these men were not interested in that aspect of the festival. So, they angrily left the area after the “rowdy, American kids” bothered them too much.
Hours later, I would find myself in a sticky situation with one of these guys…
I was speaking with a friend, stein in hand, when all of a sudden the Swedish guy, wearing lederhosen and a moose hat projectile vomited ALL OVER MY BACK. I am still convinced, to this day, that the guy intentionally threw up all over me…
I proceeded to drop my stein, which then shattered into several hundred pieces. As if my luck couldn’t get any better, a guard saw me drop the glass, which would usually end in the offender being thrown out of the tent. He came over and said “I saw what happened! Go change and I will let you back in!” So, I sprinted out to the fairgrounds, quickly realizing I had no money left as I had spent it all on half chickens and steins of beer. And because things couldn’t get any worse at that point, I decided to barter for a t-shirt, letting a German man watch me change my shirt in his kiosk (I had a sports bra on, so in my head I pretended I was in a bathing suit), in exchange for a clean t-shirt.
Yes, I lost some dignity after the longest thirty minutes of my life, but I was able to join my friends for the rest of the day. Plus, I left Oktoberfest with the best story out of the 90 plus people I went with…
This unfortunate experience also was the story that got me my job in Florence as someone who worked for the company watched the entire thing happen!!
Bad experiences are often the best stories.
