In honor of Munich’s Oktoberfest, which has been cancelled this year because of the pandemic, an excerpt from The Joys of Travel:
Remember this.
The vast hall. The great din. The spilled beer. The smoky haze. The saccharine music. The pretzel vendors. The workhorse waitresses. The buttery smell of roasted chickens. The vendors of silly hats. The bodies squeezed onto benches that disappear into the distance and suggest a school cafeteria of colossal scope and questionable fare. The strange feeling – as you drink engulfed by a human sea – of escape, of having departed the world of work, responsibility, sobriety. (Greatly heightened if it’s a weekday.) The sense of ceremony and import given, through songs and toasts and the monumental scale, to a frat boy’s passion. The private party of your table, in a humming hangar of tables, in a makeshift city of hangars, that survives new arrivals and silent departures and flows almost seamlessly from day into night. Your total ignorance of day or night. The young woman opposite you who presses her glass mug to her dirndled bosom and says with an ingenuous, combustible smile: “I love Oktoberfest!”
