This is so touching: an old WW2 Russian tank army veteran has finally found his own tank on which he passed through all the war standing in small Russian town as a monument and got emotionally shocked that people worried his heart won’t be able to cope with this.
Munich has been celebrating what we now know as Oktoberfest since 1810 when Prince Ludwig married Princess Therese von Sachsen-Hildurghausen. The festivities started on October 12, 1810 and lasted for one week. The party was such a success that the couple decided to throw the same type of festival annually. Then why is Oktoberfest in September? Eventually the celebration was moved to take advantage of the warmer weather in September, and therefore, in true Bavarian form, longer outdoor drinking hours!
(German advertisement)
While the event started off as a wedding extravaganza, Oktoberfest is now the undisputed, ultimate celebration of beer.
- the festivities normally draw in six to seven million visitors a year!
- girls and guys alike, dress in the traditional Lederhosen or Dirndls.
- the streets are full of music with the crowds singing along to the ever popular Bavarian drinking song Ein Prosit
- in addition Passion Play is performed in the city of Oberammergau - this only happens once every ten years!
- and of course most activities center around the many high quality beer options!
We'd like to call them "ghost towns", but they are clearly not abandoned. Amazingly, people still live in them, go to work in the harshest possible conditions (paradoxically making it the richest and mightiest industrial area in Russia) and then come "home" to relax in inhuman weather, non-existing infrastructure, in dangerously dilapidated buildings...
Truly, this is an "abandoned, terrifying, ruined environment", multiplied to the N-th degree! Judge for yourself:
Two-year-old Faith Marie Adams reaches for one of the U.S. flags from her father, Army Spc. Christian M. Adams' coffin, during military honors ceremonies at the Main Post Chapel on Fort Huachuca, Arizona on Tuesday, June, 22, 2010. Christian Adams, stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, died in Afghanistan on June 11. (AP Photo/Arizona Daily Star, Kelly Presnell)