  This article provides a synopsis of our recent experimental work exploring
Bose-Einstein condensation in metastable higher Bloch bands of optical
lattices. Bipartite lattice geometries have allowed us to implement appropriate
band structures, which meet three basic requirements: the existence of
metastable excited states sufficiently protected from collisional band
relaxation, a mechanism to excite the atoms initially prepared in the lowest
band with moderate entropy increase, and the possibility of cross-dimensional
tunneling dynamics, necessary to establish coherence along all lattice axes. A
variety of bands can be selectively populated and a subsequent thermalisation
process leads to the formation of a condensate in the lowest energy state of
the chosen band. As examples the 2nd, 4th and 7th bands in a bipartite square
lattice are discussed. In the 2nd and 7th band, the band geometry can be tuned
such that two inequivalent energetically degenerate energy minima arise at the
$X_{\pm}$-points at the edge of the 1st Brillouin zone. In this case even a
small interaction energy is sufficient to lock the phase between the two
condensation points such that a complex-valued chiral superfluid order
parameter can emerge, which breaks time reversal symmetry. In the 4th band a
condensate can be formed in the $\Gamma$-point in the center of the 1st
Brillouin zone, which can be used to explore topologically protected band
touching points. The new techniques to access orbital degrees of freedom in
higher bands greatly extend the class of many-body scenarios that can be
explored with bosons in optical lattices.
