I was sitting in my apartment overlooking the highway and wondering how I was to get to Oktoberfest. I had exactly zero cents in my pockets, but my friend had invited me to stay at his hostel, and he had also told me that he would get me a beer or two once in Munich, so as long as I could figure out how to get there, I would be golden. I kept smoking and looking at the Ring that encircles Amsterdam, and a day after engaging in deep meditation, I decided that I would indeed go to Munich.
I took my cellphone which had absolutely no credit, but could at least receive phone calls, and packed a bag of granola in my bookbag. With those two lifelines, I set out of my apartment, and put up a sign over the Ring: "To Munich, I'll repay you with internet fame," but no one stopped. After about 20 minutes, I gave up and walked over to the Diemen train station. From there I took the 4 stops to Centraal Station without getting noticed; I was one step closer to my goal.
I got to Centraal Station and started looking at the map. I knew that I would have to make my way to a border city, and the map indicated that Venlo was the place to go. I jumped on a train heading South, it was noon -- lunchtime -- and I imagine that my success had something to do with there being absolutely no checks on the train. I transferred at Eindhoven and let my guard down. On the train from Eindhoven to Venlo, I met a bunch of college students who coincidentally saved my trip. I was distracted talking to them when the train conductor walked up behind us. Fortunately, he recognized the students and knew that they had passes, and likely presumed that I was one of them too. "It's your lucky day," one of the students told me.
A couple of hours and a lot of heartbeats after leaving my apartment in Amsterdam, I was in Venlo. In Venlo, one of the college students took me for a tour and showed me some of the coffee shops. He told me that I was the craziest adventurer he had ever met, and I simply told him that the concept of traveling with an easily recognized currency was a relatively new concept, that I was just doing what my ancestors had done for countless centuries before.
We finished smoking, parted, and I made my way back to Venlo station. The train from Venlo to Dusseldorf had absolutely no control, and I travelled rather relaxed. Once I got off at Dusseldorf, I told myself: "It's been a few hours and you've made it from one country to another with nothing but a bag of Granola in your backpack, Munich is guaranteed."
At Dusseldorf I realized that the bullet train to Munich was heavily monitored, but that the bathrooms were not heavily controlled. I spent quite a good number of hours inside of the bathroom, praying that no one would knock on the door and ask me to get out. Hours passed, and I didn't have beer but at least I had the prospect of beer to look forward to. Somehow, it all worked out, and I exited the toilet at the stop before Munich. It was an hour between stops, but I figured that if they kicked me out, it would be when the train arrived in Munich, so I wasn't concerned.
I got distracted talking to a lady, when a train conductor appeared out of nowhere. "You don't have a ticket?" he asked me, but I told him that I had accidentally left it in the toilet, and he just walked away. The lady I was talking to told me, "if you were German, I don't think he would have let it go." And that was that, 10 hours of train sneaking later and I was in Munich.
I made my way away from the station in Munich, and after walking in loops looking for an address that existed only in my mind, I somehow found my friend's hostel. I borrowed a euro from someone, logged onto the internet, and found out which tent my buddy was in. I walked the long distance to the tent, and after wandering inside of the tent for half an hour, digging through thousands of people, I heard my friend drunkenly shout at me: "Hey, you motherfucking Dominican, over here!"
He told me: "I'll never doubt you again, José," and bought me a beer. The sequence of events after that beer become murky, but eventually I decided that I needed to follow Oktoberfest tradition and chug a beer on top of a table. I successfully chugged it, to much wild excitement from the audience. When I jumped off the table, I walked discreetly to a corner, and threw up the liter of chugged beer back into my glass. Had I failed to chug the beer on the table, I would have been booed, but fortunately no one saw me throw up, so I managed to preserve my dignity. I rinsed my mouth with somebody's leftover beer, and returned to our newfound group of German lady-friends. They had no idea that I had almost failed to chug that beer, thus saving me much embarrassment.
