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Europe|The Calm Before the Beers
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/world/europe/germany-munich-oktoberfest.html
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There are 225 hours of Oktoberfest, the suds-soaked Bavarian celebration that opened on Saturday. For 222 of those hours, there is beer.
The other three hours — the first three — have only cola, pretzels and card games. And an air of nervous anticipation that recalls Christmas Eve, if Santa Claus exclusively brought malt beverages.
Thousands of visitors will descend on Munich for the 190th iteration of Oktoberfest, which ends Oct. 5. Only a small set of hard-core enthusiasts will experience the joy and agony of the wait for its main attraction.
“It’s a little bit strange now,” Sibille Bauer, 32, a server at the Hacker-Pschorr brewery tent, said on Saturday morning. It was just past 10 a.m., and she was surveying a pavilion packed shoulder-to-shoulder with men in leather pants and women in traditional Bavarian dresses, none of whom were imbibing.
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In two hours, Ms. Bauer said, she would be carrying fistfuls of steins to the orange, wood tables that surround the bandstand in the middle of the tent, depositing liters of amber “festbiers” for about $18 a glass. At the moment, she was mostly shooing away latecomers, who were begging for a highly coveted table seat.
