Oktoberfest

Oktoberfest 2025 opens with traditional keg-tapping

Munich Mayor Dieter Reiter gave the Oktoberfest in the Bavarian capital its traditional launch on Saturday, opening a barrel of beer and marking it with the time-honored phrase "O'zapft is!" (Bavarian for "It is tapped"). Reiter then handed the first mug to Bavarian Premier Markus Söder with a wish for a peaceful festival, with the day's sunny, late summer weather auguring well for its success ...

I had to smile when I saw this in the news because it reminds me of happy times in college. Both my sister and I and also my then boyfriend took German as our required foreign language, and Oktoberfest was a fun time to practice it.

Why choose German, you might ask. I think my boyfriend chose it because of the foreign beer (ha ha) but both my sister and I were taking philosophy classes and German is a good language for philosophy ... Kant, Schopenhauer, Leibniz, Heidegger. I still remember one class where our book had the Critique of Pure Reason with German on one side and English on the other.

Sad truth is, though, that if you learn a foreign language, there's often no one to speak it with after college - we spent a lot of time watching old WWII movies to try to decifer what the bad guys (the Germans) were saying. We did get to use our German a bit, though, on our trip to Europe ... I remember ordering our food (mine was an asparagus sandwich) in German at a cafe in Lucerne, Switzerland :)

Here's an old photo of me and my then boyfriend and out families from back then ...