People of Hofbrau

After our big day out in Munich, we had some time before Petra and the kids came home. So we made a short trip down to the Hofbrauhaus, home of Hitler's Munich Putsch and a very nice brewery... Inside, it's got big wooden tables and benches, painted roof and women selling pretzel. Half the fun of this place is the beer, the other half is the people you see!

Firstly, we saw a man with a full All Blacks track suit on, strutting through the hall. The difference with this guy was he had a Louis Vuitton man bag on... In Em's words, you either have the track suit or the man bag. Definitely not both - "Take one off!"

We met a couple who asked "ist das noch frei?" to which I responded, "ja, bitte!" ('Is this seat free?''Yes!' Proud moment of understanding). They were from Cologne and I took their photo; the lady borrowed my beer for the photo as she was drinking water!!

The traditional band started, which has trumpets, tubas, clarinets and everyone's wearing traditional lederhosen. We moved to get a better view of the band, and ordered ein maß. Very exciting!

One guy started dancing with anyone he could (he accosted both of us on our way back from the loo!) and it was very funny, he had what looked like a massive shaving brush on top of his hat! It looked very silly indeed, as he danced around!

I pointed out to Em that we should be sitting at the next table over, to get a better view of the band playing. This table was currently fully occupied by older men and three guys our age. As I pointed, two of the young guys thought I was talking about them, and with the Dutch courage that comes from drinking beer, they came over and introduced themselves to us and invited us to sit with them...

Which we happily did; here I met an old, rotund German man called Caspar, dressed in lederhosen. He was jolly, drunk and only spoke German. Surprisingly, I remembered a lot more German than I thought, and had quite a lot of conversation with him!

Also, there was a sleazy old guy who resembled Colonel Mustard/the KFC guy, who kept giving me shoulder rubs if I turned away from him... Geuhhh!

Thankfully our new young friends helped us with these guys. Our new friends were Craig and Aaron (brothers) and Gregory, who was Russian but now lived in the UK and had a very weird accent; occasionally he sounded like Borat, others he sounded like Ali G! This made me question the authenticity of his Russianness, but when he spoke in Russian, it seemed pretty legit...

We had so much fun laughing, drinking beer vom fass and people watching; it was a great way to pass the time before dinner!