Two weekends ago I went to Frankfurt! I finally got to see the city that I was going to be near for the year!
As soon as we arrived in Frankfurt, we were immediately rushed to a three hour walking tour of the city!! Now I don't know about you, but my attention span and my feet are not quite up to three hours worth of information. And on top of that, take into account that the tour was entirely in German! Yep...I was in trouble! However, the lovely tour guide talked slowly and used simplistic sentence structures (which is not common in Germany!). I ended up understanding more than 50% of the tour! Pretty amazing!
We started our tour in the tourist center of Frankfurt.
It is an old square that was mostly demolished in the war, so most of the building that you see are new. There was one building that survived because it was close to the river and they kept it from burning down with the use of the river water. The first stop on our tour was a museum that used to be an old church.
Then we walked by a WONDERFUL looking sweet shop. Unfortunately we did not have enough time on the tour to sample any of the delicious goodies, and when I went back 6 hours later there was only one piece of strudel left in the entire shop! That was it! Note: Germans love sweet things!
From there we walked to the river (the Main). There was a festival going on on the banks of the river, so it was VERY crowded. On the bridge (in typical German fashion) they had dedicated the stair case on the right side of the bridge for those coming on to the bridge and the stair case on the left side for those exiting the bridge. You could tell who was a foreigner because they were not very good at following this order and would get yelled at by one of the festival workers patrolling the bridge!
After seeing the Main, we walked around a couple of museums. Frankfurt is LOUSY with museums! There are at least 15 museums that people suggested I visit! I will be taking several classes a week in Frankfurt, so my plan is to visit them after my classes. We didn't go in any of these museums, but we did see this outdoor art work in front of the contemporary museum.
And I think that even the building of modern art museum (which is different from the contemporary museum by the way) is pretty interesting!
There was also some ruins of Roman baths that we passed
and an old church that isn't really that old anymore because they have rebuilt it so many times. In the old church we got to crash a Croatian wedding!
Because Frankfurt is so international (30% of the people who live there are not German!) you can always find a religious service in your language. This particular church has services in Croatian and German.
The last stop on our tour was the Goethe House. This is the house was originally two town houses, one of which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's (who I will from now on refer to simply as Goethe because it is much easier) father grew up in. His father then bought the adjacent town house and turned them into one bigger house. Goethe was born here and the house is now set up like it would have been when he was growing up.
After the tour of this house, our three our tour was over. Our first stop after this tour was a mall (because the only things to do in Frankfurt are shop and go to museums). However, I did not do any shopping here. In this mall there is the longest escalator in Europe
Then we wandered to a lovely (and HUGE) farmers market! I hope that this farmers market is open every Saturday because I really want to come during the rest of the year and pick up wonderful cheese and vegetables. I had not eaten anything all day (except a cheesy delicious baked bread thing and coffee) so this farmers market was perfect! I first had a waffle with current jam on it
before picking up different cheeses, bread, and current wine with my friend, Rachel!
We then preceded to sit by the Main and indulge in our picnic. While we were eating we saw a beautiful rainbow
For those of you that don't know I LOVE RAINBOWS! This alone could have made my day perfect! However, as you can see there were so many other things to make this day fantastic!
After our picnic it was time to go home. So we trekked back to the bus, piled in, and drove back home to our lovely Marburg.
Tons of love,
Lizzie
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