Posted by trachten in Bavaria, Dirndl and Lederhosen, Oktoberfest | Comments Off on What a Wiesn! Our review of the Oktoberfest 2014
What a Wiesn! Our review of the Oktoberfest 2014
What a wonderful Wiesn! After two weeks, what seemed impossible has finally come to pass: the Oktoberfest 2014 is over. We’ve left Munich and are back in Blighty – with one almighty hangover and one very clear resolution: to go back and do the same thing again next year.
Until that happens, here’s a few statistics to sum up the Oktoberfest 2014 in all its considerable glory.
150 – the number of times they had to shut the underground stop Theresienwiese due to overcrowding.
500 gigabytes – the amount of mobile data used per day by fest-goers.
3646 – the precise number of items of lost property handed in in 2014
115,000 – the cubic metres of water passing through the Wiesn piping
220,000 – the cubic metres of natural gas used in the tent kitchens to roast 112 oxen, 48 calves, and around half a million chickens
6.5 million – litres of beer served
6.3 million – number of visitors
36 – number of fights with tankards
112,000 – number of recorded attempts to steal tankards
By way of comparison, 2013 saw 6.7 litres of beer drink and 6.4 million visitors, so this was a slightly quieter Oktoberfest 2014. This might have something to do with the drop in glassings – if 36 seems high (and any incidence of violence is, of course, one too many), this stands against 59 in 2013. So this year was safer and more enjoyable in a statistical sense: we’ve personally never witnessed any serious violence – compared to a British high street, this is quite literally a kindergarten. At the same time, criminality is up if you consider nicking a tankard as a souvenir a crime (we don’t!).
What would be a crime, however, would be not share our impressions of this wonderful Wiesn 2014 with you. So here they are!
One day in the life of the Oktoberfest 2014