It may still be September, but starting tomorrow in Munich, it’s Oktoberfest, that annual free-for-all of beer, pretzels and leather shorts. The festivities begin at noon tomorrow, when the Mayor of Munich taps the first keg, and continue until October 3. The city is prepared for a drunken invasion of massive proportions: last year revelers consumed 6.1 million liters of beer, and ate their way through hundreds of thousand of chickens, pork knuckles and sausages during the festival. If you’re flying in, you don’t even have to wait until until you hit one of the 14 behemoth festhallen erected in the city center to get your drink on. Munich’s is the only airport in the world with its own brewery and biergarten, Airbräu, where they’ve pre-stocked 5,400 liters of in-house Oktoberfest brew for the occasion. Visiting Americans will be represented by our very own ambassador of blondness and intoxication, Paris Hilton, who plans to stop by the festival as a PR stunt for a brand of canned prosecco she’s been flogging in Europe. Maybe she can make use of the handy five-language Bavarian dictionary provided by the official Oktoberfest website, which contains such useful terms as: varuafa (adj.) – to have a bad reputation.

*Starting today on Travelistic, in honor of Oktoberfest, look out for episodes from the Thirsty Traveler’s beer-soaked tour of Deutschland.


(Image via PixJK’s photostream)