I have extraordinarily little to say today, so I will have to try to stretch my imagination to write a full-sized blog post. While I was planning to spend the day in Wurzburg, I decided against that when I learned that it would be twice as expensive to go there from Frankfurt than from Nuremberg, which I am scheduled to visit in roughly half of a week. In fact, I am jumping ahead of myself. First, I woke up to discover that it was raining - there may be a God after all; my prayers were answered. I got up late, having felt the cold wind blowing through the window and known that I at least would not be scorched by the sun. It was the kind of morning on which one wants to lie in bed all day, watch movies, and read; it took a bit of an effort to leave the hostel this morning despite the fact that I had been hoping specifically for cooler weather. When I learned that a two-way ticket to Wurzburg would cost me 44 Euros, I went to the tourist office and, upon the recommendation of a pamphlet that I picked up there, decided to explore two culturally-interesting suburbs of Frankfurt, Kronberg and Bad Soden, which I could reach for $8.30 via the S-bahn.
My visit to Kronberg was easy and pleasant. I started off walking at random in the direction of a park and soon found myself in the city's historic center, where I bought a box of strawberries from a local vendor. The strawberries cost 3.5 Euros, which I considered to be a rip-off, but they were very fresh, and fresh fruit is hard to come by on trips abroad. I subsequently bought a pastry from a bake sale for kids with cancer and, having been thus divested of 6 Euros, decided not to buy any other comestibles until dinner.
Kronberg had all of the usual accoutrements of an old European town: narrow, winding, cobbled roads and alleyways; a couple of churches; houses with shutters on their windows and multicolored wooden boards across parts of their facades, which, I have learned, are called "half-timbered"; lots of little shops; and statues here and there. The most interesting thing about Kronberg was not its castle, which was much less impressive than the one in Montreux, but its obvious livability. Unlike in the heart of Frankfurt, which is filled (naturally) with multistorey apartments, people in Kronberg often live in their own houses, or at least in little apartment complexes that afford them a fair amount of space. The town is only 22 minutes by S-bahn (Frankfurt's equivalent of a subway) from Frankfurt's city center; it is incredibly green; it has enough stores and shops that one could get by, in theory, without ever having to go to Frankfurt proper specifically to buy anything (except, maybe, electronics); and it was quiet enough that one could hear the birds. I heard an enormous number of different birds today, though I could not recognize any of their calls and only got a decent look at one of them, which was of a pale, oaten-yellow appearance and had a hunched back. I saw the most impressive bird that I had ever seen yesterday. It had white wings, blue wingtips, a jet-black body, and a tail as long as its torso; it was built like a mockingbird but was several times larger than one. I also saw something like a jay, with mottled-brown fur, feeding today at one of the S-bahn stations.
Alas, I did what I tell my students not to do in composition classes - I switched subjects midway through a paragraph. Kronberg was pleasant but unspectacular, and Bad Soden, unfortunately, lived up to its name. There was very little to see there besides a ton of trees and a building that used to have some connection with nobles and bathing. I was happy that I made the trip, though, as it got me out of the hostel and enabled me both to see a little more of Frankfurt than I would have seen and to try reading the S-bahn. Frankfurt's S-bahn is infinitely quieter, smoother, and cleaner than Moscow's subway, and it has far fewer drunk people on it. Its only real downside is that its trains appear to come fairly infrequently, though that may in part be attributable to today's having been a Sunday. The trains of Moscow's subway come every few minutes in every conceivable direction from something like six A.M. to one o'clock at night, while I had to wait 51 minutes to catch a train to Kronberg. Nonetheless, I think that Kronberg would be a nice place in which to live if Vancouver suddenly ceased to exist - the nicest that I have seen so far, outside of Amsterdam.
Kronberg had all of the usual accoutrements of an old European town: narrow, winding, cobbled roads and alleyways; a couple of churches; houses with shutters on their windows and multicolored wooden boards across parts of their facades, which, I have learned, are called "half-timbered"; lots of little shops; and statues here and there. The most interesting thing about Kronberg was not its castle, which was much less impressive than the one in Montreux, but its obvious livability. Unlike in the heart of Frankfurt, which is filled (naturally) with multistorey apartments, people in Kronberg often live in their own houses, or at least in little apartment complexes that afford them a fair amount of space. The town is only 22 minutes by S-bahn (Frankfurt's equivalent of a subway) from Frankfurt's city center; it is incredibly green; it has enough stores and shops that one could get by, in theory, without ever having to go to Frankfurt proper specifically to buy anything (except, maybe, electronics); and it was quiet enough that one could hear the birds. I heard an enormous number of different birds today, though I could not recognize any of their calls and only got a decent look at one of them, which was of a pale, oaten-yellow appearance and had a hunched back. I saw the most impressive bird that I had ever seen yesterday. It had white wings, blue wingtips, a jet-black body, and a tail as long as its torso; it was built like a mockingbird but was several times larger than one. I also saw something like a jay, with mottled-brown fur, feeding today at one of the S-bahn stations.
Alas, I did what I tell my students not to do in composition classes - I switched subjects midway through a paragraph. Kronberg was pleasant but unspectacular, and Bad Soden, unfortunately, lived up to its name. There was very little to see there besides a ton of trees and a building that used to have some connection with nobles and bathing. I was happy that I made the trip, though, as it got me out of the hostel and enabled me both to see a little more of Frankfurt than I would have seen and to try reading the S-bahn. Frankfurt's S-bahn is infinitely quieter, smoother, and cleaner than Moscow's subway, and it has far fewer drunk people on it. Its only real downside is that its trains appear to come fairly infrequently, though that may in part be attributable to today's having been a Sunday. The trains of Moscow's subway come every few minutes in every conceivable direction from something like six A.M. to one o'clock at night, while I had to wait 51 minutes to catch a train to Kronberg. Nonetheless, I think that Kronberg would be a nice place in which to live if Vancouver suddenly ceased to exist - the nicest that I have seen so far, outside of Amsterdam.
The only things of note that happened after I saw Bad Soden were that I had dinner at a restaurant with yet another Russian-speaking waiter and that I wasted a couple of hours watching Youtube videos instead of watching a movie, as I had planned to do. I may still find time for one, though I will have to get up somewhat earlier tomorrow than I did today, as I want to see both Speyer and Heidelberg in one day, which will free me up to see Strasbourg on Tuesday. I realized that I forgot to mention the conclusion of my conversation with the old German lady who thought that a great many places in Europe were "very nice": she and her husband invited me to stay in their guesthouse in a town outside of Stuttgart sometime and left me their address. I will, regretfully, have to turn this offer down, as I did the offer of a glass of brandy after dinner. Such is life!
Frankfurt in a fog; the German countryside.
Bad Sopen was hopeless.
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