The Cannstatter Vasen

The Cannstatter Vasen is the second largest Beer festival in the world. It is hosted in Stuttgart and is much smaller and local then Oktoberfest, which is held in Munich. The Canstatter Vasen also has a much lower lederhosen per capita rating since the festival is held in the German region of Baden-Wurttemberg, rather than in Bavaria.

In spite of the lack of leather shorts Matt, Sean and I had an awesome time at the Vasen. The festival has a huge parade, the 2nd largest farris wheel in the world, and a slew of beer tents. This year we went with a couple girls (Jenny and Nathalie) from the TV Bühl women's volleyball team on Sunday, September 24th (the day after our first home match against Gotha).

On the way over, Matty and I conducted an experiment that involved locking Sean into a train station locker... aka. the worst 4 euros we have ever spent:
Since we went on a Sunday, the festival was not very crowded and we were able to find seats in the Furstenburg beer tent. We sat and ate schnitzel, a variety of wurst, and proceeded to consume a few one-liter beers. Several hours and rounds of singing the "Prost" (cheers) song later we decided to walk around the Vasen at night.

While out, we made sure to stop by one of the craziest carney booths that I have ever seen:
The booth has no title on it, but it has a large man with an impessive mustache standing in front saying essentially, "who will challenge these men? Who will win 50, 100, or 200 euros today?" Basically, the extended booth actually holds a boxing rink. Behind the mustachioed narrator stand four boxers of different wieghtclasse--bantam, welterweight, middleweight and heavyweight. Guys from the crowd walk up, get compared to the boxers by weight class and every hour or so, there is a series of one-round boxing matches. If the challenger manages to knock out the "profi" (trained professional fighter), they get a cash prize based on the weight class. The rink makes money for charging admission to watch the hourly bouts. As we walked up a , but well built, Turkish guy was parading around with his 100 euros. All I could think about was the unlikelihood of ever seeing something like this in the US, and if it did exist, what in the heck would that waiver say?

After returning to the beer tent for a final round, Matty and the girls went for a farris wheel ride and Sean and I hung out and sang along with the überkäse (super cheesey- my own new german word!!!) band. Once we decided that it was time to go around 11pm, we found our way back to the train station and proceeded to get on an ICE (the really really fast) train. Unforunately, and unbeknownst to the North Americans, we were using an inexpensive train pass that did not allow for us to travel on the fast train. Later a guard pointed this out to Jenny, who proceeded not to tell us and when I asked her if we needed to get off the train at the next stop, she smiled, said "no... don't worry about it" and passed out. 20 minutes later, 5 female ticket people came to us and they were ANGRY!!! Fortunately, one of them spoke English, so I was able to do the talking and I was able to calm them down and negotiate a 20 euro fee for all five of us. She was being very reasonable and could have written us each tickets for 40 euros or more.

Bullet succesfully dodged!

So, we finally returned to Bühl at roughly 1:30am and dragged ourselves home after a very long, but exciting weekend. Our string of beer festival weekends finished there, but the memories we compiled and the songs we learned will haunt our minds like mustard on my favorite pair of jeans.