October festivals (part 2)
We can’t very talk about October festivals and avoid talking about the Bavarian elephant in the room, so today we’ll start our look at October festivals talking about the one and only Oktoberfest.
Oktoberfest – Theresienwiese, Munich, Germany
The festival started back in 1810 to celebrate a royal wedding, but that party has grown both in duration and number of visitors to occupy 16 days and drink up to 6.5 million litres of beer during that time span.
The festival is a celebration of everything that has to do with the amber ‘nectar’, sitting at long trestle tables with thousands other beer fans in humongous and multi-floored tents, this has been an international event bringing in visitors from all around the globe. We should mention that the beer is properly complemented by a very Bavarian-style diet, including chicken, oxen and pork, in a variety of forms.
The celebration is quite epic in scale, employing more than 10,000 people and has its own police force, lost and found office, childcare centre, fire brigade, post office, first-aid station, consumer protection unit and baggage checkroom.
But this is Germany so that’s not all, they also install their own sewage system, power stations, U-Bahn terminal and over a thousand Portacabins.
It’s a crazy-crazy festival that should not be missed by any fan of beer.
Matchmaking Festival – Main St, Lisdoonvarna, County clare, Ireland
The small city of Lisdoonvara – or Lisdoon for short – is known for two things: one reason is because of its spas, and the other is the tradition of matchmakers.
The Matchamaking Festival is meant to provide social events for those who are looking for a mate – most of them being men. It used to be a much more serious affair in older times, now it’s more of a local celebration which includes amateur horse racing and traditional irish craic by the pub-load. But there’s still a matchmaking theme throughout the thing, even though updated for modern times, in this case including a speed-dating weekend.
