Smoking at Oktoberfest


****Update: Since I wrote this story a few years ago, smoking has been banned inside the beer tents at the Munich Oktoberfest. If you want to go out for a cig, you have to get a coloured bracelet so the bouncers know to let you back in.****
smoking-at-oktoberfest
UP IN SMOKE: An Oktoberfest visitor enjoys a cig. Will he be allowed to in the future?
Pic: CC gabemac

OLD STORY: Smoking is still allowed inside the Oktoberfest beer tents despite growing calls to ban it.

The debate around the "blue smog" comes up again and again around Oktoberfest time and this year it’s going to come up again.

The smoking lobby (and the Oktoberfest tent owners) say banning smoking in the tents would create more problems than it solves.

They claim that making all the smokers go outside whenever they wanted a puff would mean a big fire hazard as there’d be heaps more "traffic jams" around the entrances.

Non-smokers say they should just get over it and Oktoberfest should fall into line with the rest of Europe, where bans are encouraging more and more smokers to butt out.

But this is Germany, after all. Unfortunately smoking is still regarded here as more of a social habit than the dirty, destructive addiction it’s though of in say, Los Angeles or Sydney.


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Need more Oktoberfest info?

• Go to the main Oktoberfest Munich page.
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