Oktoberfest! Just kidding...

People climbing over the tracks. Shoulda seen the
girls wearing Dirndls and  heels, poor things...

Once upon a time (last Friday to be exact) a group of five intelligent young people traveled to the main train station after their German class and spontaneously bought a ticket for five to Stuttgart for the following day. That Saturday in Stuttgart just so happened to be the Volksfest, a crazy festival/fair that seems like a slightly scaled down version of Oktoberfest. They met at the train station Saturday morning around 8, took three different trains to get to Stuttgart (the last of which stopped on the tracks for a hour and everybody had to get off, climb down the rocks, risk getting crushed in a landslide of dirt and pebbles, then scale a concrete wall and hop the fence), met up with some friends of theirs who had arrived the previous night (and who had had an adventure of their own!), scarfed down some food from the food court in the Stuttgart train
station, then hopped on a tram to where the Volksfest was being held.

Carnival ride from Hell. Not really, but it lasted
forever and I had bruises for days...

Little did these young people know that the following 14 or so hours would be incredibly fun, alarming, hilarious, and tiring. The most tame period of the adventure was during the time they were actually at the festival (only six hours or so). They "snuck" into a beer tent (they still can't figure out if they were supposed to get a wristband or not), ordered huge 1-Liter mugs of beer, danced on tables with the natives, belted out the lyrics to popular tunes that the DJ spun, ate a whole chicken, lamented over the fact that they were going to miss the Chippendale's performance the following evening, ate some pasta and macaroons, made friends with some dudes from Mississippi and Florida (they were battle buddies on leave from the Army for a while), rode a carnival ride (the longest ride ever-it lasted for SEVEN MINUTES! No exaggeration!) and finally called it a night and wandered back to the main train station. Then the real adventure began.

There had apparently been an accident or something that caused huge train delays and resulted in the majority of the tracks being closed. Well now. These young people needed to get home because their ticket was only good for a 24 hour period and they had class on Monday and homework to do! Some dude came by and yelled, "There's a train and it's leaving NOW!" Then it was chaos-these intelligent young people were sprinting madly toward this train, along with everyone else. They just barely made it, having to squeeze together and get cozy with a group of Germans wearing Lederhosen. These Lederhosen-wearing Germans just so happened to be going the same way for two of the three trains, so the young people struck up a conversation and had company on the way home.

The third and last train home stopped suddenly and unexpectedly and announced that it would be having a 30 minute delay. So two of the young people hopped off in search of a restroom (didn't find it) and made friends with a 27 year old law student named Christian who has perfect English because he studied abroad in Ireland. The intelligent young people (and the 27 year old law student) finally made it back to Freiburg at 3:30 Sunday morning, a full two hours after the scheduled arrival time. They then had to walk 40 minutes back to their dorms because the trams weren't running at that time, but that's nothing new!

All in all, it was a wonderful experience, although we were all slightly disappointed because the Germans were not exhibiting their typical punctuality. However, it resulted in a wonderful adventure with wonderful people and I wouldn't change any of it even if I could!

All photo credit in this entry goes to Allison!!!