Our trip started with an uneventful flight from Philly to Detroit, where we had about two hours to eat lunch and ride on the tram that runs from one end of Detroit's oddly linear airport to the other. Then we boarded our flight for Frankfurt, and a few movies (_Margot at the Wedding_ for me, _No Country for Old Men_ for my dad) and not much sleep later we landed in Germany.
We took a taxi to our hotel, checked in, and watched a little of a bizzare German kids' show with a guy in a really impressive dragon costume before we settled in for a quick nap. Our first point of tourism was the zoo, so we took a shuttle to the airport, then a train to the center of Frankfurt. The city offers a surprisingly natural-seeming blend of modern skyscrapers and medieval buildings. And the zoo was a pleasant surprise as well. The nocturnal animal house, the penguin exhibit, and the monkeys in particular were impressive (though any zoo monkey experience now seems disappointing after interacting with the primates at Apenheul on our Amsterdam trip last year).
Upon leaving the zoo, we walked into the heart of town and came across a massive protest, with a throng of mostly young people dressed all in black. After being unable to determine what they were protesting, we set off in search of food. My dad ordered a curried bratwurst sandwich with mustard, which he very much enjoyed (I have a nice photo of his first bite that I'll post later). Oh, that reminds me. The whole town pretty much smells like sausage. It's probably because there are people selling sausages every hundred yards, including guys with portable grills slung over their shoulders (another pic to be posted later). And as my dad ate his sausage, the protest march caught up with us and we found out they were anti-fur animal activists. Pretty funny, ja?
Next we hit the wedge-shaped Museum of Modern Art, which had some unique architectural and curational elements, as well as a nice pop art section. By this point we were starting to drag--especially me, since I managed to get sick pretty much when we left. We stopped at a Mercedes Benz dealership/cafe (really) and got some juice and panna cotta (we ordered one and the friendly waiter gave us a second for free), then walked down to the Main River for some picturesque views. After a brief stop to look at Goethe's birthplace, it was back to the train-airport-shuttle-hotel route.
We got back to the hotel by 5:30, and both fell asleep by 6:15. In fact, my dad's still sleeping (at 3:15 a.m., 9 hours later), but the earache I'm developing thanks to this cold woke me up at 2:30, so I'm here typing in the hotel lobby. Hopefully I'll get a few more hours of sleep on the train from Frankfurt to Weimar tomorrow. All in all, our impressions of Frankfurt are: the zoo is cool, there are lots of H&M stores--3 on the same street within a few blocks!--the people seem happy to live there, medieval architecture can coexist with glass and steel buildings, and everything smells like sausage.
I'll probably post again tonight with stories about the work camps at Buchenwald and our arrival in Berlin. Until then, tschüss!
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Monkeys?
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