Oktoberfest festivities in Hong Kong offer games and German food with the beer

Hongkonger Selina Chan has just visited Munich, Bavaria, to attend the original German beer festival. As she's only an occasional beer drinker, she went as much for the "merry" atmosphere as for the drinking. Chan says children were welcome at the carnival-like festival, and she didn't see too much evidence of drunkenness in the afternoons. (Evenings may have been a different story.) "It is very much like our New Year's Eve flower market, and people there treat it as a big annual event," she says.

Oktoberfest celebrates the marriage of Crown Prince Ludwig to Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen in 1810, which was commemorated with several days of festivities including horse racing on fields outside Munich called Theresienwiese or Therese's fields. This is still the site of the Bavarian festival.

While the wedding was the occasion for the partying, the roots of the festivities lie in Bavarian harvest festivals. It's only in modern times that the festival is seen primarily as a celebration of beer - it's also a celebration of food, a German Thanksgiving.

Bavaria being good agricultural land, food is plentiful, heavy on the pork, potatoes and cabbage, and also on the wheat - whether in your beer, your pretzel, or your cake.

The peasant origins of the festival also explain the lederhosen and quaint clothing. A couple of hundred years ago, this was Sunday best, and the design showed other Bavarians where you were from.