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| Erin's Journal for 10-05-02 Saturday we wanted to see Octoberfest, as this was the last weekend. Our hosts had waited to go this year, and we were delighted when Andreas put on his traditional lederhosen and long socks for the affair. We joined the throng on the U-Bahn to the fairgrounds, where we wandered around gaping at the many rides and huge tents. Glenn had been to Octoberfest before with a prior girlfriend, so he was just there for me, but we all enjoyed peoplewatching and even rode a couple of the roller coasters. All of the beer tents were closed by the time we were ready to go into one around 1pm, as they were all filled to capacity and had to wait for people to leave before admitting more. I was not all that interested in standing hip to hip in a raucous drunken crowd inside one of the tents anyway, so we listened to the people singing and cheering as we walked by, then jumped the U-Bahn again to get to another traditional biergarten area in the Viktualmarkt. This is a gourmet foodstuffs market with an outdoor beer garden in the middle, so we bought some traditional Bavarian sausages and some beers for Andreas and me and sat outside for an hour or so, chatting and crowd-watching. Around 3, we decided to walk around the Viktualmarkt a bit before heading back to Helena & Andreas' place, where we grabbed our equipment for transferring photos and journals to the website, as we'd asked Helena to call and confirm the night before that this internet cafe allowed their use. It took about 30 minutes to walk there, but once there we had trouble getting the computer to recognize the card reader. As it turned out, one of the other customers was a computer expert and a regular there, so the cafe employee called him over after trying himself, and this guy spent almost an hour on two separate computers before figuring out how to get one to recognize our equipment. Finally we had all our stuff installed and set out to transfer journals to the website so Glenn to could work on putting them on the website while I worked with photos. This time the computer did have Word on it, which should have made the transition easy, but it didn't have all the translating software installed apparently, and when we tried to view our journals, they were filled with a bunch of extra crap. The expert came back over and installed a bunch of translaters from the computer's hard drive, but to no avail. So after 2 hours of attempts, we were unsuccessful, again, at getting jounals on our site!!! The frustration was palpable. We settled on getting some photos resized and uploaded from Glenn's camera instead. Mine (much more photos there) would have to wait till tomorrow, as it was getting late and we were expected for dinner. So we finished up there around 8:30pm and went home to find a dinner of fondue awaiting us! I had never had any, and Glenn remembered it fondly from childhood, so it was a memorable night for both of us. The salad too was excellent and the company superb, so we had a wonderful evening. |
| Munich's Rathaus, or town hall |