We all need some beer to lean on

On day 3 we arrived in Munchen (sorry, no idea how to put an umlaut in), the city that the English call "Munich", and the crazy Italians call "Monaco di Baviera". Seems like a nice place. In Munich, I ate my first ever pretzel. Or my first ever proper size one at least. I've had the little tiny snacky ones before. As far as I can tell, a pretzel is like bread with some sort of salty glaze on it. Hence it tastes like salty bread, but is actually rather tasty. I don't know if pretzels are a particularly German food or not.

The thing that the Munich residents (who I wish were called Munchkins) particularly like to do is drink beer. And none of your pansy pint glasses here. No sir. Just Big Beer Steins, holding a whole litre of beer at a time. And it's nice beer too. We went to join them in this activity at the Hofbrauhaus, probably the biggest and most well known beer hall in the city (maybe the world?).

Some people are a bit funny, and like to dress up when they go out to drink beer. We found a German couple who had dressed up as Germans for their visit to the drinking. They kindly let us take a photo of them - here they are:



I think they may have told us their names, but my brain has not seen fit to record the information for posterity. This was taken just outside the Hofbrauhaus, but I didn't think to get that in the photo as well. Note that German Man is holding a digital camera which doesn't fit in too well with the rest of his authentic garb, whilst German Woman has a wolly cardigan for some reason. Maybe she was expecting it to get cold later in the evening. I think she would have been fine to have left the cardigan at home, as it was not that cold really, but maybe that would not have been the German way.

Did I mention that the beer is mostly served in litres? Cool. Here's the beer:




That was my beer. You can see in the photo that I have started to drink some of the beer already. Foamy. They also do a quite large menu of Authentic Munchkin Food. Most of which is served with potato salad. I'm not someone that particularly likes potato salad, but the stuff they had there actually tasted pretty good, despite looking revolting.

Also in the beer hall was a German Oompa Band. Sadly this did not turn out to be a band made up of Oompa-Loompas, it was instead made up of (probably) bearded (probably) middle-aged (probably) full-size men. This disappointed me on two counts:
Count 1: I'd have loved to see Oompa-Loompas playing big brass instruments - how would they hold them?!
Count 2: The Oompa-Loompas could live quite naturally in a town populated with Munchkins. They'd fit right in. Whilst on the subject of little people, what's with all the singing they do? The Oompa-Ls have a song for every event, you can't stop the Munchkins from belting out a tune and the Seven Dwarves are world-reknowned for their Hi-Ho nonsense. Someone should write a thesis on "Why groups of little people love to sing". And maybe Busted should be added to the list too.

So anyway, we had some beer. I'll finish with a quote from Chris T-T, from his most excellent song "Drink Beer".

Drink beer, and you'll be alright.
Drink beer, every day and every night.
When the world is giving you a heavy old time,
Drink as much as you can and you'll be fine.

See you down the pub.