The next day we head into the city center again for another of the free tours. We get another Irish guy by the name of Keith. He leads us all over the place, telling us all about the war, the founding of the city, etc. My favorite was his little anecdotes about Oktoberfest. Every year, tons and tons of people loose their passports at the festival, but one nation more so than any other. Australia. It's so bad, that the Australian consulate has to send representatives from Berlin down to Munich to process all the new passports needed for the drunken Australians. No other nation needs this, just Australia.
He also tells us all about Hofbrauhaus. Now, I don't know what it is with Europe, but they all seem to be obsessed with going to the bathroom. Particularly guys going to the bathroom. In Amsterdam they had these weird S-curved metal things right out in the middle of the street with a grate at about eye-level. The guy would stand in it and stare out at everyone while he went in relative privacy. Kind of odd. Girls have to pay to pee because all of the girl toilets - kind of like giant yellow tin cans - were closed up in the 70's due to the hard drug problem. The girl toilets were won through a hard-fought battle of over 200 women peeing on different bridges of the city every day until the city decided to give them free public toilets. After this, I didn't think any other peeing story would catch my interest - who could top 200 women simultaneously watering a bridge together? Munich came close.
In the old days, Hofbrauhaus, the oldest beirgarten in Munich, did not have any bathrooms. The men (who were the only ones allowed in) had to go out into the street to pee. Because of this, the street sloped inwards to a drain. It still does, in fact. Now this is not that strange, but it gets better. They finally decided to install an option inside the beirgarten, because people were just too lazy or couldn't hold it or they just wanted to stop peeing in the darn street, I dunno. So they installed a drain beneath each and every table in the joint. When you needed to go you would take your walking stick (most gentlemen had them at this time) and tap your friends discreetly on the legs. They would then move their legs aside so when you went, it wouldn't splash up onto their pants. Some even had a groove carved right into the walking stick so your recycled beer would flow right down the walking stick, neatly into the drain. Very little splash back. So sensible.
It gets better.
Today, there are free bathrooms inside, so normality is restored. But wait, now the beergarden is thinking about all these guys that have to throw up because they drank too much. Each male bathroom has inside it a vomitorium. That's what it's called. It's a little round hole, kind of like a toilet, with a bar surrounding it that's just the right height for you to hold onto, lean over, and hurl your unwanted beer into. Men have to use this option if they need to let it go. They are forbidden from vomiting in the toilets. If an attendant catches you (and there are many bathroom attendants in Germany) you could get kicked out.
Females don't have this problem. They can just vomit right into the normal toilets. I think it's actually unfair that women have to hold on to dirty toilet seats while men get a special bar, but ah well. There's a way around that. Everyone knows how the line for a woman's bathroom can get. Pretty darn long sometimes. Sometimes you just can't hold your puke long enough. If this is case, ladies, you go up to a beirgarten attendant, make the universal sign for "I am about to hurl on your shoes" and he will escort you to the boys bathroom. He will enter the bathroom first and order, not ask, but order, every boy to stop what they are doing. If they're peeing they have to stop mid stream. They are ordered to stare directly at the wall and nowhere else. The attendant will escort the woman in and sometimes even hold her hair back while she uses the well-placed vomitorium. He will then escort her back out again, her dignity and identity fully intact because none of the boys have actually seen what she looks like. The bathroom usually explodes into laughter after this, but whatever. There's no vomit on the floor, so everyone wins. And that is the story of the Hofbrauhaus.
Another favorite feature of mine in Bavaria is the maypole. Maypoles are common in Bavaria. Every Bavarian town has one, actually. If one town manages to steal another town's maypole, the loser has to throw the other town a giant party. Pretty good deal to me. The most recent and famous one of these thefts was that of the airport security's maypole by the city police of Munich. Always nice to know that the police can have some fun, too.
The tour lasts for a while and there are many laughs to be had by all. He also handles the WWII stuff with tact and shows us around a lot of the famous Hitler sites as well. So sad, funny, interesting - the tour is a real hit.
We end the night by getting pub food at our hostel's bar and watching the German/Australia game. Everyone's there for Germany, of course, but we cheer for Australia. Sadly, horrid game for them, but we had fun anyway. I imagine the Australian bar was very drunk and very depressed that night.
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