Frankfurt

The 3rd of June started off nicely with Forest and I meeting a really cool guy named Logan. Logan is from New Zealand so he and I talked a little bit about that... the highlight of that conversation was probably when he told us he and his mother had tried out for parts in Lord of the Rings movies. His mother plays an orc in a couple of the movies. Ha ha ha so awesome.

After breakfast and getting ready, Forest and Logan and I went out for a stroll in an attempt to find the PalmenGartens which currently has an exhibit on European Landscape Architecture, I was excited... however the day did not exactly turn out as we had planned.

Rather than finding the correct path to the PalmenGarten we took a side road, Hamburger Allee, that led us to a great adventure in miscommunication, random meetings, beers on a hot day, and good food.

After walking a significant ways we came upon a kiosk which was open, and as it was Corpus Christi and most of the restaurants and kiosks and all the stores were closed we decided to stop at this few and far between oasis. As it turned out this Kiosk had another patron, a Spaniard who had lived for about a year in the USA, in New York. Well, let me tell you he was the man to find!

Our Spanish friend, although living in the USA had never learned English and as our Deutsch is less than what some might call 'gut' we had difficulties understanding him. As I was the most proficient at German I was used as a primary translator of the Deutsch that was spilling forth from this slightly intoxicated mans lips.

From what we determined utilizing our skills at Deutsch and Spanish we gathered that he was telling a very long drunken joke, this is it simplified from a 15 minute conversation: a friend of his died due to alcohol (drank himself to death,) then his friend went to heaven and asked St. Peter to let him in. Well, St. Peter said yeah okay, but drinking isn't allowed up here so you have had your last drink. Well, this didn't sit too well with the guy so he drank in heaven and god and st. peter kicked him out the door (this little bit he mimed out to help us get the gist of the story.) So now his friend is down in hell and couldn't be happier because he can drink.

Good joke, huh? Well although the joke isn't too much fun the entire trying to break the language barrier that accompanied this was a riot. Logan and I were confused and cracking p while Forest fell asleep on the bench. After we finished our beers from the Kiosk we said goodbye the Spaniard and walked on down the road.

Well, we were still slightly lost and now we were hungry as our bellies were full of only beer, so we stopped to eat at one of the few restaurants we had seen open and ordered food and drinks. We sat outside under the shade of a giant umbrella, or at least we did after the waiter had been yelled at by a German customer for opening an umbrella. Poor waiter.

So at the restaurant I had a plate of fries and a curry sauce with fried cheese dish. It was excellent!

We stayed there till around 5 pm and then wandered back towards the central part of the city were our hostel in located but we did make a stop at a massive tower in Frankfurt that had several sculptures and a water fountain outside of it, quite interesting.

After returning to the hostel Logan crashed and slept for a while, Forest and I just read and worked on journals and looked at photos. A pub crawl was about to start but we opted not to go on it since the people were all noisy Americans and other english speaking men and it seemed less than an exciting time.

As it turned out we were able to witness a couple of fights (from our window in the hostel we narrated it, more fun than you can imagine) that took place around the hostel many crack deals and even Forest being “attacked” by a woman who wanted him to come into one of the peepshows. It was great see the look of torment on his face and his mingled anxiety and horror as the woman wrapped her arms around his head in something like a chokehold and shuffled towards the door of the bordello. He suffered all that for his addiction to Banane Milch, ha ha ha.

The next day, the 4th we went to the Palmengarten. It was really beautiful and they had many enclosed exhibits simulating different biomes. Forest and I took lots of photos and videos in the tropical exhibit then we wandered into the European Landscape Architecture Exhibit. It was really cool and I gained lots of ideas and critiqued the featured works. Took a lot of pictures too. Then, Forest and I sat and chatted a bit about landscape architecture and photography. It was really nice to have a quite chat about the things we are invested in.

After the exhibit we walked around a bit more found the rosen garten which was quite lovely and found a gift shop. Forest went in and bought postcards, stamps, and alcohol… ahhh my little brother. The best part though was the alcohol he chose. One was a bottle of Apfelwein the local specialty of the Frankfurt area and the other was a sparkling wine of 15% alcohol with those always classy screw off tops. Well Forest drank the drinks and we wandered some more, finding some really cool places like a desert exhibit, an open field area that looked like it was filled with local varieties.

We then found a cave area that had iron gratings covering several side passages and tricked in there some, doing superman, side crow, flag, and the like. Well, by this time it was getting late and we had to go meet up with Logan for dinner so we left the Palmengarten and walked back to the hostel where we ran into Logan and then left for dinner across the Main (the river flowing through Frankfurt.) We had a nice walk and went through the old town area with its old impressive structures then across on of the multiple bridges along the main and found an area that had several restaurants and pubs along it.

The restaurant we went to had only a few vegetarisch, vegetarian, choices so I got a really tasty though expensive meal of herbs blended into a “grün sauce” and a hard boiled egg and a pitcher of apfelwein. The meal was good and we talked and relaxed and just enjoyed the outdoor atmosphere that the city really does an excellent job at offering. Then after we had settled the charges we walked to a Kiosk and got a beer and right next door was this little pizza place that I got a pizza at for cheap and forest got a tuna salad. We walked to a park that was diagonally located from the pizza place and sat there in the park with the beers and pizza and tuna-fishy-Forest.

The park was the location of a couple of interesting occurrences. 1) Forest tried to have another gumball out of a street side vending machine, but the gods interceded and stole his money as the machine jammed. 2) A strange guy rather effeminate and maybe in his 70’s walking his little white dog came over to us and needed to get by us into the park. We had been sitting on the step to the park and as it was a raised park with a fence all around it except at its three entrances we happily obliged in moving… however the man did not rather he said something in Germany to us… something along the lines of your pizza box is in the way of my dog, move it. Well I understood his meaning and moved the pizza box, while Logan and Forest just stared slightly mystified. You can be sure that this made us crack up laughing once the guy was out of earshot and we were heading back to the hostel.

We stopped once more that night, this time at another Kiosk near our hostel and with a small seating area outside of it. Logan and I got bier and Forest went to find a Banane Milch. We sat and drank and talked then headed back to the hostel. Logan & I went out again for a few minutes simply to get some pictures of the great area we were in. Then it was bed time.

A cool man from Switzerland was in our dormer room and he and I chatted some and he wrote a few cool words in Romanian as his fiance is Romanian and he was headed to see her and bust her out of her country finally after going through much paperwork.

Our final day in Frankfurt dawned and I woke up to meet up with Kimberly and her friends from the military base. I met them at the train station and oriented them a bit in the Frankfurt area. Then we separated so they could go look around the city for a bit with plans to meet up again later and I to go finish packing up our stuff in the hostel and check out.

The packing all went of without a hitch and we put our luggage in a storage cell for later when we came to pick it up before the train to Köln. Forest and I then went down to the Main and sat next to the river till 12ish when we met up with the girls near the cathedral in the old town. We walked through the cathedral and a roman ruins. In the the cathedral candles were available for purchase so I bought one for Kimberly and myself.

The girls had already eaten so Forest and I split up from them again and went to find something to eat while they explored more. We found an indian supermarket with home-made samosas for sale and bought 8 of them along with a bunch of other little treats, of special note is the Jamaican Ginger Beer.

The girls met us at a small park in near the Frankfurt Oper, where Forest and I had come our first day in Frankfurt and goofed off in. We walked with the girls to the hostel in the red light district and got our stuff then hurried over to the train station which fortunately is only a block and a half away from the hostel and boarded the train.