Munich happened on a whim.
It was September of 2007 and my first time abroad. I was studying Italian, as well as pizza, gelato and men, in Padova, Italy, for a semester during my junior year of college.
After spending the better part of my childhood spinning a globe and pretending to venture to wherever it would stop, I was thirsty for a real-life spontaneous adventure. During my high-school years, I had also acquired a taste for beer. These two factors combined led me, and three other hapless friends, to purchase our round-trip tickets to Munich on the Eurostar for the city's famed Oktoberfest.
It is unlike me to be completely spontaneous. Sure, I'd like to think I can flow with wherever the wind may take me, but, in reality, I'm a typical closeted Type A personality.
This trip was one of the rare chances my laid-back exterior got to run wild, keeping the planner in me under lock and key.
We knew Oktoberfest started in September and we had a three-day weekend coming up. We were also well aware all hostels, hotels and any kind of lodging had been booked since April.
We didn't care.
We'd arrive early, get in line for one of the tents, and take it from there. We'd carry our minimal possessions in our JanSport backpacks. We'd give ourselves 24 hours. By the time we were all-partied out, we would be making our way back to the train station. "Besides," one of my companions assured us, "a lot of people don't even go back to their hostels until early morning anyway."
Did I mention we unknowingly booked our tickets to arrive the day before Oktoberfest started?
Twenty-four hours seems doable when you’re weeks away from your caffeine/alcohol infused misadventure.
When you’re standing on the streets of Munich in the central-European post-dawn chill that seeps through your Northface fleece, tired because a seven-hour train ride yielded only one hour of sleep, you’re cursing yourself for your stupidity. Our only option at the moment was to escape the cold, spotless streets of Munich to a cozy, pink wallpapered café where we could plan how to fill the hours that ominously stretched before us. We congregated over a small table covered with brochures, authentic German pretzels and cappuccino. We ate, drank, planned and took turns in the small bathroom with our travel-sized toothbrushes, face wash and Sephora eyeliner.
After stopping in another café, we made our way on the efficient German subway system to the Deutsches Museum. To pass time, we marveled at Lufthansa planes sliced down the middle, posed for a photo shoot on a ship exhibit and toyed with the hands-on science displays upstairs. Somewhere in the physics section, our suppressed sleepiness started to bubble to the surface, forcing us onto our next adventure: shopping. Germany is known for its comfortable and crunchy Birkenstock clogs, and we used our caffeine rush to scour the city.
We walked through hordes of messy and dimly lit shoe stores around downtown Munich, finding nothing. We browsed through endless shelves of plainly patterned Adidas sneakers, oversized and bland Birkenstock clogs and myriads of black and tan leather “all-purpose” shoes that I could have sworn I saw in my grandmother’s closet. The shoes were so terrible and the aisles so crowded that the many stores we combed through seemed to blend into one mess of haphazard shoe boxes and ugly, green carpeting.
Fed up, we turned our attention to the downtown outdoor markets of Marienplatz, walking through rows of white tarp selling fragrant fruit, bratwurst, pretzels and, of course, bier. Since we didn’t damage our wallets yet, we browsed multi-lingual souvenir stands for T-shirts, postcards, and whatever else we could fit in our backpacks.
If we couldn’t wear our money, we figured we could at least drink it. We made our way to the nearby Hofbrauhaus, where we were overwhelmed by rows of wooden picnic tables surrounded by throngs of tourists speaking foreign languages, waiters in black slacks and white button downs carrying liters of ten-euro bier, people swaying to waltzes belted by tubas and locals in lederhosen. Lunch was good; saucy bratwurst, potatoes and liters of bier filled our stomachs. After finishing our meals and making friends with a few Australians, we decided to head toward Munich’s English Gardens— which is very Central Park-esque—before dark. The Gardens were beautiful and quiet. They were also the perfect place to nap before heading back to the train station to lock our bags and dress for the night.
Between confident sweeps of bronzer and mascara articulated in front of large, public bathroom mirrors, our anxiety started to seep through.
Could we make it all night?
Where would we stay if we couldn’t?
We pushed our worries aside and decided to wing it. Our poor foresight and spur-of-the-moment planning skills had gotten us this far unscathed. Drinking and dancing the remaining hours away should be the easy part. The night turned out to be pretty unremarkable in that it wasn’t any different from any other night out in college. No one woke up in a German holding cell, had gotten a tattoo, or lost her passport. We bar hopped, guzzled down liter after liter of bier, took shots with the bartenders and befriended tourists and locals alike.
Zero hour came at around 3:30 a.m. We were drunk, cold, tired and scared. Our Australian friends from lunch offered to share their hostel with us for the remainder of our time, so instead of strolling the shady, prostitute-ridden streets until it was time to leave, we accepted.
Looking back two years later, home in New York with memories of frothy bier on my tongue, I still can’t believe we trusted them, still can’t believe our 24 hours of spontaneity worked out.
But I guess a little bit of faith was what I needed to live out my childhood globe-spinning games.
By 
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