Story: Ditching tents for shoes: 24 awake hours in Munich

MUNICH Munich happened on a whim.

In our four-classroom school’s student lounge in Padova, Italy, we four Oktoberfest-bound students haphazardly found each other by a show of hands. Unfamiliar with the language and each other, we ventured to the nearby travel agency and, in broken Italian, ordered our rail tickets. Since almost all hostels were booked by March, the tickets were our 24-hours passes to a place where beer is served by the liter, lederhosen is sold in department stores and most meat is eaten in sausage form.

But college students are not always the most astute calendar readers. Holding our non-refundable tickets with one week to go, we realized we would be arriving one day early, missing Oktoberfest by hours. We decided to wing it. We would comb our hair on sidewalks and brush our teeth in café bathrooms. And at its least, “our” Oktoberfest would make for a good story.

Clutching backpacks and tote bags containing our worldly possessions – makeup, “going-out” clothes, a Euro stash and passports – we sprawled across our “Harry Potter-esque” cabin on the cramped and clunky regionale train that would take us directly from Padova, across the icy Austrian Alps and into Munich. Despite our best attempts by taking Tylenol PM and huddling together, we managed a total one hour of sleep.

Shivering in the central-European morning chill on the smooth, clean Munich sidewalks, we hurried into a cozy, pink-and-white wallpapered café. Congregating over a small table covered with brochures, authentic German pretzels, macchiatone and cappuccino, we planned the next 24 hours and took turns in the small bathroom with our travel-sized toothbrushes, face wash and Sephora eyeliner.

Since drinking liters beer among droves of tourists in a maximum-capacity tent was out of the question, we opted for the next best thing: shoe shop. As Germany is known for its comfortable and crunchy Birkenstock clogs – items that fill college students’ closets – we used our caffeine rush to scour the city.

We walked through hordes of messy and dimly lit shoe stores around downtown Munich, finding nothing. We browsed through endless shelves of plainly patterned Adidas sneakers, oversized and bland Birkenstock clogs and myriads of black and tan leather “all-purpose” shoes that I could have sworn I saw in my grandmother’s closet. The shoes were so terrible and the German-speaking staff so hard comprehend that the many stores we combed through seem to blend into one mess of haphazard shoe boxes and ugly, green carpeting.

Defeated on the footwear front, we wandered through the downtown outdoor markets, walking through rows of white tarp selling fragrant fruit, bratwurst, pretzels and, of course, bier. Since we didn’t damage our wallets yet, we browsed multi-lingual souvenir stands for T-shirts, postcards, and whatever else we could fit in our backpacks.

In Marienplatz, the heart of the city, we ventured into overwhelming Galeria Kaufhof – the Macy’s of Munich. The department store was stirring with floors of tourists and locals sampling expensive perfume and sorting through racks of Levis. But unlike its American counterpart, mannequins were adorned in lederhosen and clearance racks were nowhere in sight.

After a short nap in the grassy English Gardens – Munich’s Central Park – we headed back to the station to fix our hair and makeup, change our clothes and part with our bags in the station’s lockers. With sweeps of bronzer and mascara articulated in front of large, public bathroom mirrors, we accepted “shopper defeat” and prepared to pursue Munich’s other appeal – bier gardens.

We set our sights on Munich’s most bustling and touristy garden, the Hofbrauhaus, also in the downtown Marienplatz area. Awaiting entry outside’s the massive building’s pale white walls, we were crunched shoulder-to-shoulder in a mass of tourists. Bursting through the doors, the inside was filled with rows of wooden picnic tables surrounded by throngs of tourists speaking foreign languages, waiters in black slacks and white button downs carrying liters of ten-euro bier, people swaying to waltzes belted by tubas in the garden’s center and locals in lederhosen.

When the garden closed at midnight, we were intent on not wasting our makeup efforts, so we took a cab to a barrage of nightclubs situated in an alleyway at the city’s outskirts. For a cover charge of approximately ten euro at each club, we bounced from dancing with locals in a low-lit, run-down German rock club that reeked of beer, to bumping into a group of Australian guys we met during the afternoon at a shinier and less crowded house-and-R&B club across the way.

“We’ve been thinking about you girls all afternoon,” one chimed uninhibitedly, his already difficult accent slurred by endless bottles of Becks.

“Probably because we’re the only group of girls in the city right now,” one of us answered, blushing among the groups of male tourists who dotted the bar and dance-floor walls.

When the city began shutting down around 3:30 A.M. – streets emptying and getting dodgier by the minute – we passed the final three hours in the Australians’ dark, but clean, hostel. Our final fuel station, we rested before enduring the cold, sunrise walk to station where we would sit entranced like zombies, waiting for the smooth, but pricey, Eurostar to carry us home.