On a sunny Autumn morning, I bid farewell to my friends the Haslingers whom I had received such warm hospitality. A few days respite at their home, a spa town near Bad Tölz, south of Munich, while I waited for my passport which I had left on the back seat of an Austrian friend’s car. Leaving a leafy suburb by the S-Bahn (train) into the city, I felt nervous for the first time. I was thirteen the only other time I had been in Munich. On the train, my mind swept back in time catching a whiff of Cinzano from an old German woman we had visited on that trip, a favourite kids drink called Cola-mix(coke & orange). The memories flooded back to more innocent time for me. This first adventure had been with a family friend who was great friends of the Haslinger family. We had enjoyed a fantastic two weeks hiking in the Alps, cementing my love for mountains. With walks on the Benediktenwand in Southern Bavaria, the Hintertux Glacier in Austria and via ferrata on the Langkofel in the Italian Dolomites. Sitting in beer gardens drinking a large Shandy called a Radler, eating pretzels under the blue & white diamond flag of Bavaria that greets every village south of Munich.
The circumstances this time couldn’t be more different. Here, I was travelling Europe not on holiday, but looking for work and trying to get by speaking German, only knowing the word ‘Danke’. With a summer in the Greek Islands under my belt, I had made the two-day ferry journey from Crete to Ancona in Italy. Joined by friends I had made grape-picking in Crete, I found it hard to leave their company once arriving in Italy. So, I began the long hitch-hike up through Northern Italy. The following day I was supposed to meet friends in Chamonix, France to climb Mont Blanc but I arrived just too late and had to wait for their descent to spend a week catching up. After leaving them and the stories of home, I travelling through Switzerland to Austria where I stayed another week or so with friends in a small mountain village near Bregenz before heading to Germany. I had partly planned some of this, meeting different people at different stages, so I was never on my own much.
Arriving at the Hauptbahnhof in Munich, I felt startled by the bustle of city life, everyone was in a hurry, going places. I felt out of step and didn’t seem to remember my way around. It took awhile to settle, a couple of nights at the station followed by some time at the campsite at Thalkirchen. The reason I was in Munich at all was because of my Aussie friend, Dave. From our time on Crete we had talked at great length about the city’s good reputation for backpackers being able to make and save money to travel to Asia and beyond. Expats throughout Europe migrated to Munich, it was the place to go after the Med season ends for its winter ‘Grand Siesta’. We had arranged to meet at the train station and I was glad to see the big Aussie. We had arrived in time for Oktoberfest beer festival, the biggest beer festival in the world. But first was the prelude, a mini-festival in a remote monastery called Andechs, traditionally the Thursday before Oktoberfest starts.The monastery has been making beer since the 1200’s and is a couple of miles out-of-town up a hill. A walk through the Autumn trees and the old cobbled road led to the bizarre sight of Aussies and Kiwis in the middle of a drinking competition, dancing on tables was quite a sight in this usually tranquil setting.They make great weisse (wheat beer) and dunkels (dark) beer here and this revelry would set the tone.
Munich Oktoberfest
Back in Munich, my first Oktoberfest was a real eye opener for me. Arriving at Theresienwiese from a crushed U-Bahn station, it hosts this enormous event. Hundreds of thousands of people descend upon this area to drink out of a large litre beer glass called a Mass, eat, sing and dance every day for two weeks. The sound of Oompah bands, smell of pretzels, roast chicken, sausages and beer filled the warm air within huge tents. Sliding along wooden benches soaked in the sticky sweet beer, singing local beer songs like ‘Eins, zwei, g’suffa!’ The central stage with Bavarian blue & white ribbon poles host the main bands of the tent and played advert songs for local businesses during interludes. Proud Bavarian’s wear hunting hats, lederhosen and other traditional clothes and glowed in this rousing arena. Mulling around between ten huge tents, looking at fair rides outside, meeting hundreds of people from around the globe in a beer-lovers playground every, day for two weeks. Spaten, Löwenbräu, Hofbräuhaus, Hacker-Pschorr, Augustiner and Paulaner were the main ones I remember. Some days we hung out longer at Thalkirchen campsite with thousands of Aussies and Kiwis. Each night a singing/drinking competition of who could shout the loudest “Aussie!” “Kiwi!” Daily drinking competitions sapped energy and any savings but I met some fantastic people from around the globe. Among them were an Aussie couple from a 1000 miles west of Brisbane, who had won flights to London on a game show and had never seen so many people in their lives. They were bewildered, a first I had seen for Aussies. We had a great time jumping between camper-vans, meeting all types and I also bumped into some familiar faces from the Greek Islands. We’d had a blast but it couldn’t last, Dave went back to London and my hangover kicked in.
I had to register with recruitment agencies to look for work and go to interviews, which all seemed a bit strange to me after my laid back summer in the Mediterranean and recent partying. So, thankfully it wasn’t too long before I had a job hunting breakthrough. A Canadian friend Drew also picked up a job, while hitching through Austria at a ski resort. I went to an interview for a hotel job in Herrching on Ammersee. This was like a retirement village on a beautiful lake at the end of the S-5 train line, south-west of Munich. It was also near the monastery Andechs where I had been before the Oktoberfest. Grateful for the job start, I quickly threw myself into the hotel kitchen role. It was a small country hotel with high standards and Austrian owners. I couldn’t speak German but tried and asked for help, although many chefs intrigued by my presence were happy for me to speak English to improve their English language skills. I met staff on breaks at cafes in the afternoon for these lessons overlooking the beautiful lake. The food in the hotel was fantastic, almost all dishes were made fresh and I learned quickly. Trainee chefs learned on site chef school with butchery skills, making sauces & stocks from scratch. We ate lunch together and I tried some unusual regional gastronomy dishes. Home-made blood sausage with potatoes looked okay until you burst the skin and a chunky, thick, dark red sauce oozed out and my stomach churned.
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Hotel Piushof, Herrsching am Ammersee
Soon the Bavarian winter was coming and I was glad to be working and saving money. I was offered to stay in the tennis court changing rooms, being unused and the courts covered in snow most of the winter, it was the next best offer to a room. I made it comfortable and there was plenty of room. When my boss asked if I knew someone to help me, I recommended an English friend Paul whom I had met in Munich. We hung out and a couple of months passed quickly. I went some weekends to my Canadian friends hotel in the Austrian ski resort of Kuhtai. The journey from Munich to Innsbruck on the train was fantastic but unfortunately often for me in Friday night darkness. Ski weekends were a great escape. Other times we went out in Munich sometimes till dawn in beer halls like Augustiner-Keller before taking the morning train home. By now I knew the place like a local, jumping between S-Bahns, U-Bahns and trams with great ease. Münchener Freiheit was a hub station to Schwabing and the English Garden. We’d head for the wide tree-lined boulevard of Leopoldstraße. This was the cool part of town and we found ourselves part of the expat scene. However, back in Herrching one bar owner played Louis Armstrong and was a great place for a quiet drink. There, we hatched a fruitless plan to climb Mt Ararat in Turkey but abandoned when a stories broke about missing scientists and troubled times in the area. The other local bar played rock music and many locals liked American culture, wearing cowboy boots, in all denim, playing pool and rock ballads on the jukebox. I thought it was ‘Back to the Future,’ a throwback from the eighties. But you could run at tab at the bar with pen marks on your beer mat that included all your drink, cigarettes and food. Quite a novelty for a Glasgow boy. As a pool shark, I was frequently put forward in pool competitions to win money.
Paul’s friend worked in the Bayerische Hof Hotel, a famous hotel where some of the world leaders stayed at for the G7 summit. There were 88 different nationalities in the hotel and we used to hang out watching rap tunes on a young MTV. We also made trips to the Olympic Stadium, BMW HQ, museums and churches. It was on a cold winters day, I visited Dachau concentration camp and it brought the gruesome history of the area into sharp focus. Another visit was to the Hofbräuhaus, where Hitler had made speeches. Some expats who had lived in Munich for years told stories of some old locals muttering ‘Auslander’ (foreigner) but I didn’t hear any of it myself. My old friend Lex had been a POW in Poland during the Second World War and had to walk about 1000 miles to Allied territories. Long after, Lex became good friends with a German guy called Hans and his family, the Haslingers who we all became friends with. I had met them many times here and back in Scotland. Hans told us when he was just 18 years old, he was sent to Stalingrad during the Second World War and how lucky he was just to be here. Two incredible guys Lex and Hans, were brought together by the love for the mountains. While I seemed quite settled at Hotel Piushof, I was getting a bit restless, my grasp of German wasn’t what it should have been and longed for home. But I had learned so much in the gastronomic kitchen where chefs trained on site with only the freshest ingredients and harnessed butchery skills. This was an aspirational place but I was too young to appreciate it. So, I came home to see family for Christmas and see my girlfriend in London. Paul was also heading away to meet his girlfriend in New Zealand.
When I came back to Munich in January it was bitterly cold and I initially wondered what I was doing here. I stayed at the main youth hostel where I met mainly tourists at breakfast time, often American Eurorail types discussing their routes to conquer as many countries in their fifteen day pass as possible. I found it a difficult time with low funds and often thought of leaving. But I wanted to re-kindle this city’s party scene, so took up an offer to stay with friends at the long-winded suburb of Unterpfaffen-hofen-Germering. This was a lovely apartment sharing with a Danish and Irish girl, both professionals who spoke German well. On one dark cold night we watched the film Amadeus at another friends apartment. This film about the life of Mozart really inspired me. Munich is quite near to Salzburg, Austria and enjoys a similar culture and architecture. Tenor opera singers would busk under the archways on Sundays on Marienplatz. The city also has costume parties and host a festival called Fasching like Venice Carnival. It starts 4 months before and was originally adpoted to scare bad omens/weather from farmers crops at harvest time. I found myself embracing the culture and had improved my German considerably by reading newspapers and trying to do the crosswords. After my flatmates moved to take jobs in the EU, I stayed a short while with friends in Pasing, in central Munich before sharing an apartment with Irish friends near the zoo in Thalkirchen. This was above a car dealership, near the main campsite used for the Oktoberfest. I was lucky enough to land a great job in a cool bar called Barfly in Sternstrasse. Stopping at Lehel U-Bahn, it was only 5 minutes walk to the bar. I worked my way from kitchen porter (spühler) to become second chef in no time. I enjoyed my time there learning a great deal with a charismatic Parisian head chef, a good local chef and a terrific Japanese sushi chef who did Monday nights. I was invited by our German chef friend to the Starkbierzeit (strong beer festival) in March at Paulaner where his uncle was a director, a real eye-opening experience. Big mass beer dark and as strong as wine in an old medieval, nowhere near as busy as Oktoberfest, but a great local experience, few tourists and nicknamed Salvator. I really enjoyed this spell working the kitchen but was lured by the management to the main bar where I was trained in cocktails. A bartender is a recognised trade in Germany and commands respect unlike my home town of Glasgow. Here in Munich it was common for bartenders to turn up to work in their sports cars! My Scottish accent became a novelty and made great friends with flamboyant colleagues from all over Europe and South America. Top Munich club P1 was just round the corner and we were the pre-club for it. So many party nights, great pay and I had a cool apartment in Frauenhofer. l felt at home here and have fond memories of ‘Always take the weather with you’ by Crowded House being the song of summer ’92. Music from INXS and U2 bringing out their Berlin inspired Achtung Baby was massive in Germany and the Irish expats. I saved enough to take well-earned time off to meet friends in London and Paris for a month around Easter time. I ended up in Belgium for two of those weeks, loving the small villages, food and hospitality.
one of the few photos of me at this time
In my absence, there was a lot of activity in Munich. The troubles in the Balkans had created a migration of people escaping to a better life. The German government had more than encouraged hospitality companies to take on staff, with at one point 60,000 people crossing the border daily. So when I came back to work, a new group of staff greeted me. These were a new people for me, they brought their problems and often argued between each other due to their different ethnic backgrounds. I was somewhat startled by their behaviour, it seemed strange to me and I felt they were being ungrateful. But I didn’t get involved and started to pity the despair they must suffered in their homeland. Things came to a head when one man stabbed the boss’s hand by accident trying to attack another staff member.
In this difficult atmosphere I planned my move. One of the bartenders Mickey, his dad owned the food counter in a biergarten. This was just the tonic I needed. I felt glad about leaving Barfly, things hadn’t been the same since I had gone on holiday. At 20 years old I had ‘made’ a career here learning to chef in a very busy hip place where Boris Becker, Bjorn Borg and German celebrities were regulars. I had grown in confidence, speaking German and had a flair for making cocktails. So I had no trouble throwing myself into this new role at the biergarten. But this was no ordinary biergarten, it was the Parkcafe. Situated in a park between Hauptbahnhof, Königsplatz and Karlsplatz in the heart of the city, this was hidden by trees, but still a very busy place. With thousands of people each day descending for lunch and drinks, it was a popular place for locals and tourists alike.
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Parkcafe, Munich
Löwenbräu was the beer here and served mainly as Helles or Wiesse. Working long hours in a high volume biergarten, serving traditional food of halbes hendl (half roasted chicken), kartoffelsalat (potato salad with chive & dressing), fleischsalat (meat salad), other salads, bratwurst, sauerkraut, pretzels and other breads. Mickey, his dad and I worked in a small shed serving canteen style food and delivered some dishes out to the beer garden. But usually we shouted out “halbes hendl!” out of the smoke filled hut. I sometimes helped the beer hut guy’s and we all became friends. The heady sweet smell of wheat beer and the barbecue cooking smells filled the air drawing more people to the daily throng. Sometimes we drank as many as eight steins on a shift but it was long twelve-hour shifts and some office workers would have 2 or 3 within an hours lunchtime. It was hot this summer with temperatures nearly reaching 100F, although the tall trees helped providing some shade. I enjoyed the hard work with high reward. I was talent-spotted one day, offered some modelling which was a bit random but I accepted. We went out nearly every night in Schwabing, still the best area for nightlife. We headed for the Irish bars to start with and later would maybe stop for fantastic small pizza stands before heading to a club. Then sometimes cycling home since the U-bahn had finished.Summertime spent here felt similar in atmosphere to working in the Mediterranean, with every night being a buzz with something on. Sometimes having my favourite beer at the Augustiner-Keller.
By now I had many friends, some German, expats from England, lots of Irish, American and Scandinavian. I was popular at ‘Günther Murphy’s’ Irish Pub in Schwabing having spent many times there being only one of two Scottish expats at that time. The Shamrock was another bar I frequented and both had a great vibe. But I also had close connections with German bosses with my time in the Parkcafe and Barfly. So I would help eager Irish students looking for work, which made me very popular. I learned from this how sometimes helping others gave more meaning than merely looking out for myself. I actively sought out to help people even though I didn’t know them very well. Because I had set up Mickey’s cousin from Florida with a Swedish girl, I met many of her Scandinavian au pair friends. These were good times, going to great German clubs like Nachcafe and the Parkcafe had a hip club as well. It was hard to get into Parkcafe even although I worked there. Rumour had it that this grand building was a favourite hang-out for the Nazis in the 1930’s. Anyway, some friends saved money and left for trips to Asia and beyond but I seemed to get stuck and didn’t want to leave this party town. I had no real desire to leave. Once you live there, you realise how central it is in Europe, only an hour or so drive from four different countries.
Still living in cool flat sharing with an Irish friend Eddie and Wolfie in Fraunhoferstraße near the river Isar. Wolfie worked in another cool bar and he would play jazz piano in the afternoon sometimes. Local bars were often small and narrow with only room for a few people. In sunny days, time was spent in cafes by the river. This became one of my favourite parts of Munich and quite the beauty spot in summer. Cappuccino’s were made here with spray cream on top and could be enjoyed in cafes or even at the butchers shop. The only people drinking Jägermeister were down & outs covering the bottle in brown paper bags like you see in American movies. People would descend upon the riverside, strip off on the banks, sunbathe, drink beer and swim naked in the river. Although we kept our shorts on! Crates of beer sat in the water to cool. We returned them to the supermarket and got a deposit back which made it very cheap. We made trips north to Heidelberg for a Sekt wine festival. We had a fantastic time meeting Germans with a different accent and we to house parties where people bring food. This was not a custom I was familiar with coming from Scotland. We watched Germany lose to Denmark at European cup final. Met many Americans from the local military base, before heading back to Munich. With summer in the air we made trips south of the city to village summer festivals by the lakes. These were good times. But with Munich being so central in Europe, its easy to travel and to want to travel. No flying. Trains, lift shares or hitch-hiking were the preferred mode of transport.
One night my chef friend from my time working in Barfly offered me a tantalising opportunity. We had last been out together at the Stark beer festival back in February in which a strong beer (about 13% alcohol) is made by Paulaner. His dad was a director at Paulaner, one of the beer companies in Munich that has a tent at the Oktoberfest and he said he could get a job working in the VIP area. This was great contact because these were difficult jobs to get. Tips are standard in Bars in Munich and I was well used to wearing my pouch as a till. But this was a different league, with some waiters/ bartenders making £10k or more for two weeks work. So I was quick to offer my services, this was a fast track to saving for a trip to India, the Far East and Australia.
With only six weeks to go I felt restless, so I planned a wee trip to Spain. Munich was a fabulous city for just about everything but after listening to so many travels in this travellers hub, I missed the open road and had got stuck here. So I took the gamble of going away before taking this great role, Mickey (nicknamed “Schicki-Micki” because of his high society connections) and his dad were cool about it. I took off with a couple of friends who were starting the same way. I had been in Munich nearly a year and had learned so much about this city, its people, the expats who lived their, it’s nightlife and how I had grown here. My experiences here would prepare me well for the future and although I was leaving, I knew I would be back and not just for this great job offer. It had become my second home. How different it was to my hometown but so many good memories. How I had grown up from late teenager to twenty-something, I was ‘Made in Munich.’
Yes, I went back and yes to another Oktoberfest!
Prost und tschüss!
As always, tell me what you think, have you been?
Bumps On The Road 