One of the primary reasons I chose to study abroad in London was English — I speak it, Londoners speak it and I didn’t have to learn anything new. Sure, London isn’t as adventurous as Chile or Madrid, but I forgot all my Spanish the day I left class at the end of 10th grade.

I figured I would supplement this lack of adventure with frequent trips outside the U.K. Last weekend, I took the first of those trips, to Munich, Germany for Oktoberfest.

The trip was bookended by experiences that seriously concerned me for the rest of the semester — I nearly lost a roommate in one of the simpler countries I planned to travel to. Nonetheless, over the next 14 weeks I’ll visit nine countries with 10 distinct travel partners, each whom I dearly hope returns alive.

The festival began Saturday, so this traveling companion, one of my roommates in London, and I had a day to explore Munich on Friday. Our first destination was Dachau, as neither of us had visited a concentration camp.

Walking around a place of such massive death on a whim before a weekend at the biggest beer festival in the world was a dichotomy my emotional brain struggled to rationalize.

On the train ride to Dachau, we overheard other visitors to the camp discuss their upcoming weekend at Oktoberfest and the site was crowded with obvious festival-goers — one audacious enough to bring her GoPro and selfie stick. Granted, the next day, I brought my camera to Oktoberfest and followed the depressing day with two terrific, albeit nerve-wracking people.

You’ll see just about everything and everyone at the festival that attracts more than 6 million people every year. By the end of Saturday, I found myself sitting at a table with 10 strangers and my roommate. Strangely enough, they were strangers to each other as well, though a day of drinking brought them together.

The friendliest of the group was a German man whose name I couldn’t possibly recount now. I asked him why he was sitting at this table with a group of people he’d never met before and found out that he had sat at the same table for the last 15 years. This year, he brought his son to the experience and arrived before 9 a.m. to secure the table, no matter who he would sit with.

The curmudgeonly Romanian man sitting on the other side of me took longer to crack, but I shared my Romanian background with him and he opened up like the rest of the table. It’s amazing how welcoming people are at Oktoberfest, but I think it’s just the beer talking. A reported million liters were consumed in the first weekend alone.

Heeding the advice of my new German friend, my roommate and I awoke at 6 a.m. to secure a seat inside the Augustiner tent on Sunday. Turns out that the festival isn’t nearly as crowded on day two, but it was worth it for the prime location and pair of British couples we shared a table with. Midway through the day, however, my roommate was missing and neither of us had phone service.

Four hours and a little panic later, he showed up at the airport with an hour to spare before our flight. This is a testament to the incredible Munich public transportation system, which is shockingly easy to navigate even without speaking a lick of German.

The rest of my semester is filled with trips, including a trip next week to Italy and a final trip to Iceland. I can’t expect those trips, with a similar language barrier to Germany, to be any easier.

But if my luck holds up, I’ll find my friend living in Amsterdam with or without a working phone, and I won’t need to speak Czech to navigate Prague’s public transportation. There, I’ll try to pay for a ticket and avoid angry glares from fellow passengers. Or maybe just rent a bike.

Jack Rose is a junior broadcast and digital journalism major. You can email him at jlrose@syr.edu or follow him @jrose94 on Twitter.

Published on September 23, 2015 at 10:29 pm