Hello, dear readers!
I left off my last post describing the magical train ride from Bonn to Mainz, though I did a fairly poor job of describing it as magical. It is hard to make it sound exciting to see castles and ancient churches through a train window when you are tired and a little sick of medieval architecture, but I was probably in the only part of the world in which it is possible to see the aforementioned types of buildings with such frequency as I did.
I was met by a wholly different scene in Frankfurt. I was glad when I saw on my Google map that my hostel would be a mere couple o blocks from the train station, but as I walked towards it, I grew a little worried; Google maps are often unreliable, and every store past which I walked was either a sex shop, a strip club, or a seedy-looking hotel. The people walking past me looked downtrodden and up to no good, as though they had weathered a hundred years of misfortune and no longer expected anything out of life; men stood in small groups talking to one another and smoking cigarettes on either side of the sidewalk, creating a tunnel; a woman who recognized me as a tourist tried to get my attention, asking if I was "the man with the plan"; and the man next to her told me that my lips looked nice and asked if he could kiss them. I grew further worried when I walked into the hostel itself: the registration desk seconded as a bar counter, there was music playing in the room, and people were socializing. I was reminded of the hostel that I visited in Interlaken in 2010; I remembered my roommates' drinking and talking until all hours of the night and never turning off the lights.
Over the next several hours, I discovered that this was the best hostel that I had visited in ages. The music that they left playing all of the time makes great background noise for writing, talking, dining, and any other activity, really. It turns out that, having grown more social over the past few years, I like interacting with strangers just fine, and the bar area is both small and entirely disconnected from people's dormitory rooms. It is not a bar that people visit in order to get raging drunk; rather, it is a place to relax and meet other people. The hostel's WiFi works wonderfully, and some of the other people here are interesting to talk to, as they share my interest in travelling. I spent the latter part of the evening chatting with a couple from Scotland, and when I went up to my room at around 11:00 PM, the lights were off and everyone else was already asleep.
The hostel's location is catastrophic nonetheless. People who look like they have never done anything good in their entire lives walk past the hostel's store windows at all hours; people with empty gazes, contorted faces, unnaturally hardened jaws and foreheads, missing limbs, and missing teeth walk or drag themselves past the windows; crazy people stumble across the streets, yelling, and engage in bizarre interactions with one another; they pick at the sidewalk as if digging for something; and they sometimes get in fights right out front of the building, probably over failed drug deals. When I took a walk around the block this morning, I saw people selling drugs, shooting up on the sidewalk, passed out with their limbs splayed in all directions, and generally stunned to see someone with clean clothing and a tourist map walking past them. People in this part of town have an odd way of continuously looking like they are plotting something underhanded. It might be their hunched posture and darting eyes; it might be their extremely dirty and tattered clothes; it might be their jerky movements or the fact that they smell like rotting fish and discarded coffee grinds. They exist in a sort of underworld, unaware of everything going on around them that does not fit in with their social caste. And, for some reason, they all seem to collect a few blocks away from Frankfurt's train station. The city as a whole has more alcoholics and tramps than I have seen in any other city in Germany; this country might not be the idyll that I initially made it out to be.
I left off my last post describing the magical train ride from Bonn to Mainz, though I did a fairly poor job of describing it as magical. It is hard to make it sound exciting to see castles and ancient churches through a train window when you are tired and a little sick of medieval architecture, but I was probably in the only part of the world in which it is possible to see the aforementioned types of buildings with such frequency as I did.
I was met by a wholly different scene in Frankfurt. I was glad when I saw on my Google map that my hostel would be a mere couple o blocks from the train station, but as I walked towards it, I grew a little worried; Google maps are often unreliable, and every store past which I walked was either a sex shop, a strip club, or a seedy-looking hotel. The people walking past me looked downtrodden and up to no good, as though they had weathered a hundred years of misfortune and no longer expected anything out of life; men stood in small groups talking to one another and smoking cigarettes on either side of the sidewalk, creating a tunnel; a woman who recognized me as a tourist tried to get my attention, asking if I was "the man with the plan"; and the man next to her told me that my lips looked nice and asked if he could kiss them. I grew further worried when I walked into the hostel itself: the registration desk seconded as a bar counter, there was music playing in the room, and people were socializing. I was reminded of the hostel that I visited in Interlaken in 2010; I remembered my roommates' drinking and talking until all hours of the night and never turning off the lights.
Over the next several hours, I discovered that this was the best hostel that I had visited in ages. The music that they left playing all of the time makes great background noise for writing, talking, dining, and any other activity, really. It turns out that, having grown more social over the past few years, I like interacting with strangers just fine, and the bar area is both small and entirely disconnected from people's dormitory rooms. It is not a bar that people visit in order to get raging drunk; rather, it is a place to relax and meet other people. The hostel's WiFi works wonderfully, and some of the other people here are interesting to talk to, as they share my interest in travelling. I spent the latter part of the evening chatting with a couple from Scotland, and when I went up to my room at around 11:00 PM, the lights were off and everyone else was already asleep.
The hostel's location is catastrophic nonetheless. People who look like they have never done anything good in their entire lives walk past the hostel's store windows at all hours; people with empty gazes, contorted faces, unnaturally hardened jaws and foreheads, missing limbs, and missing teeth walk or drag themselves past the windows; crazy people stumble across the streets, yelling, and engage in bizarre interactions with one another; they pick at the sidewalk as if digging for something; and they sometimes get in fights right out front of the building, probably over failed drug deals. When I took a walk around the block this morning, I saw people selling drugs, shooting up on the sidewalk, passed out with their limbs splayed in all directions, and generally stunned to see someone with clean clothing and a tourist map walking past them. People in this part of town have an odd way of continuously looking like they are plotting something underhanded. It might be their hunched posture and darting eyes; it might be their extremely dirty and tattered clothes; it might be their jerky movements or the fact that they smell like rotting fish and discarded coffee grinds. They exist in a sort of underworld, unaware of everything going on around them that does not fit in with their social caste. And, for some reason, they all seem to collect a few blocks away from Frankfurt's train station. The city as a whole has more alcoholics and tramps than I have seen in any other city in Germany; this country might not be the idyll that I initially made it out to be.
I tried to spend today being less of a tourist and enjoying myself more. After walking around the block and looking at drug addicts, I went to the waterfront, as it would give me easy access to the historic city center and figured to be generally pleasant. Frankfurt's waterfront turned out to be spectacular. There are two pedestrian- (and bike-) only bridges across the river Main, which divides Frankfurt into two halves; each section of shoreline has two tiers of separate pedestrian and bike paths, one several yards higher than the other; the paths are lined by trees and benches; and the views all along the river are fantastic. The shoreline is very broad and affords pedestrians and bikers a great deal of separation from cars and the city itself, and the lower bike and pedestrian paths are bordered not by the water, but by stretches of grass, on which young women (and men) sit down or lie, sunbathing, on nice days. The wind coming off of the river felt so refreshing that I stood in the center of one of the bridges for several minutes, taking it in. From either pedestrian bridge one has a great view of Frankfurt's historic center and its newer skyscrapers in the downtown area. Like Dusseldorf, Frankfurt is a city in which the old and the new harmoniously meld with each other.
I have little to say about Frankfurt's historic city center except that it is a little too small (I wonder if Frankfurt was a historically small city.) but is nonetheless pleasant. Despite having been billed (by a friend of mine) as a bland city in which there is nothing to do, it has some very interesting sights and a ton of museums. Like Bonn, it has a whole series of museums on the side of the Main opposite the historic city center, one of which, the museum of architecture, I visited. This particular museum was free and was actually more of a collection of photographs relating to architecture. The subject matter of the photos ranged from courtyards to highways to workers' houses; the exhibition was aimed at showing photos of urban landscapes that had especial artistic merit, and the little plaques describing them showed that photography is a very sophisticated art that requires a giant amount of thought and technique. I left the museum of architecture at something like 4:00 PM and read a book for awhile on a bench that had not been submerged by the swelling Main, got dinner at a café, one of the waiters of which was from Tadzhikistan (and therefore spoke Russian), and came back here to write this email.
One of my final two points are that there is a great deal to see, including statues, fountains, and more museums, outside of Frankfurt's historic center. I ended up exploring other parts of the town in an effort to find a place to eat, only to discover that the idiot working at the hostel whom I asked for recommendations sent me to the most expensive part of town to get dinner. I ended up getting dinner just outside of the city's historic center, as I at least knew that it existed.
The other point of interest is that Frankfurt's red light district borders directly with its very modern city center. The red light district goes on for several blocks and ends as abruptly as though one had bumped up against a wall: one crosses some street or other and is suddenly surrounded by office buildings, banks, and men and women wearing suits and ties. The red light district is, in that sense, very much like Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. The couple from Scotland with whom I spent last night were shocked, as they are more used to a gradual worsening of surroundings' leading into the bad part of town, rather than a sudden worsening or sudden improvement.
I think that that sums up what I had to say for today. I have the feeling that I said more interesting things last year than this year, though I suppose that I cannot really do more than describe what I see; I cannot force my writing to get better. I started thinking that I might make a jaunt into Northern Italy for a week if the Danube (and the Rhine, and the Main, and every other reasonable-sized body of water in southern Germany) continued to flood, as my following my initial itinerary to a T might become unfeasible, but I hope not to have to do that, as I do not have an Italian phrasebook or train map with me; it would be much more convenient, geographically and logistically, to continue on my previously-planned path, whence I intend to pray to God for an improvement in the weather rather than getting ready to flee the scene of meteorological disaster. I am off to shave, shower, and go to bed!
I have little to say about Frankfurt's historic city center except that it is a little too small (I wonder if Frankfurt was a historically small city.) but is nonetheless pleasant. Despite having been billed (by a friend of mine) as a bland city in which there is nothing to do, it has some very interesting sights and a ton of museums. Like Bonn, it has a whole series of museums on the side of the Main opposite the historic city center, one of which, the museum of architecture, I visited. This particular museum was free and was actually more of a collection of photographs relating to architecture. The subject matter of the photos ranged from courtyards to highways to workers' houses; the exhibition was aimed at showing photos of urban landscapes that had especial artistic merit, and the little plaques describing them showed that photography is a very sophisticated art that requires a giant amount of thought and technique. I left the museum of architecture at something like 4:00 PM and read a book for awhile on a bench that had not been submerged by the swelling Main, got dinner at a café, one of the waiters of which was from Tadzhikistan (and therefore spoke Russian), and came back here to write this email.
One of my final two points are that there is a great deal to see, including statues, fountains, and more museums, outside of Frankfurt's historic center. I ended up exploring other parts of the town in an effort to find a place to eat, only to discover that the idiot working at the hostel whom I asked for recommendations sent me to the most expensive part of town to get dinner. I ended up getting dinner just outside of the city's historic center, as I at least knew that it existed.
The other point of interest is that Frankfurt's red light district borders directly with its very modern city center. The red light district goes on for several blocks and ends as abruptly as though one had bumped up against a wall: one crosses some street or other and is suddenly surrounded by office buildings, banks, and men and women wearing suits and ties. The red light district is, in that sense, very much like Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. The couple from Scotland with whom I spent last night were shocked, as they are more used to a gradual worsening of surroundings' leading into the bad part of town, rather than a sudden worsening or sudden improvement.
I think that that sums up what I had to say for today. I have the feeling that I said more interesting things last year than this year, though I suppose that I cannot really do more than describe what I see; I cannot force my writing to get better. I started thinking that I might make a jaunt into Northern Italy for a week if the Danube (and the Rhine, and the Main, and every other reasonable-sized body of water in southern Germany) continued to flood, as my following my initial itinerary to a T might become unfeasible, but I hope not to have to do that, as I do not have an Italian phrasebook or train map with me; it would be much more convenient, geographically and logistically, to continue on my previously-planned path, whence I intend to pray to God for an improvement in the weather rather than getting ready to flee the scene of meteorological disaster. I am off to shave, shower, and go to bed!
A modern city of historic interest.
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