Part III-2. Exploring Frankfurt am Main

The streets were wet when we got out of the S-Bahn trains and it was drizzling. Although it was only like 6:30pm, it felt more like 10:30 to me because, I guess I was tired and I didn't get much sleep since I slept the night before I left the US. We wanted to find our hostel first and get something to eat, if any restaurants were open. We followed the directions from the hostelworld.com and were able to find the hostel pretty easily. On the way, we found Frankfurt streets very... well, red. 

There weren't any naked girls out on the streets, but there were so many signs for peep shows, Christmas specials, and etc. The guy in the airplane was right, these streets were spread out for like 5 blocks. The girls in bikinis were advertising 30 euros for like 30 minutes, and kept grabbing us and like 500 other guys in the streets....But, soon we found our hostel, which was right in the middle of this Red light district. 

The girl at the front desk was pretty nice, spoke English, gave us map of Frankfurt and some tips as well as the price of the girls on each block. We told her we weren't going there, but she didn't believe us saying, 'okay'. 

These are the pics taken from our little balcony.  The hostel was pretty secure with double-buzz-through doors and 24-hour staffed desk. The desk also sold some food and beer and there was a game room in the basement with pool tables. 

The room itself was pretty nice too. The beds were small, but it had a little balcony, and a private bathroom with shower. It was already dark when we arrived, so these pics are from the morning the day after.

Cement walls in the shower and no door... it wasn't bad though, it did the job. We haven't showered for a while, so it was pretty nice. Good hot water.

Everything was normal in the bathrooms except these flushing buttons. It was on the wall and we pressed on it; the small button was for #1 and the big one was for #2, I guess they wanted to conserve water. 

At the time, we though this hostel was just 'okay' but later found out that this hostel was actually one of the nice ones at a pretty cheap price (about 20 euros per night per person). They even gave us the little German gummy bears and free towels. After we got settled and took a shower, we were hungry. So we decided to go eat at this Pho restaurant we saw when we were walking to the hostel. If you don't know, Pho is this vietnamese rice noodles in a meat soup. Or you could get other stuff too. 

Before we walked into this place, we thought, 'well, Germans speak SOME English right?' Well, it turned out, that was such an American thought. These people were, I guess Vietnamese, who also spoke German, but not English at all. It was kinda funny, because my brother and I were not able to communicate with any of the people in there, but we still got our food. My brother got some noodles with pork, and I got that classic Pho with some pork in it. We also added water which they called mineralwasser. When you learn a language, you learn in bits and pieces, and this was one of those. Wasser in German = Water in English. Just like Haupt + Bahn + Hof. Haupt is Central, Bahn is Train, and Hof is Station. This kind of reminded me first time I came to the US. I thought if I lived in Germany for a few years, I could pick up German easily. 

After we had dinner, we went to sleep pretty early. But we both woke up around 2am. Jet lag. So we went down to the front desk to get some beer.  

We bought this when we were walking around the streets after dinner. Just some cheap food, but this becomes very important later in the trip. 

We each had a corona, which was the cheapest beer they had. And we had another ones, one of them was a dark beer called Schofferhofer and the other was wheat beer called Kovice. Maybe the other way around, I'm not sure. They were both very good though. We also found this (korean) book that someone left in the little bookcase in the lobby that was a trip-adviser type of book about 4 countries, Germany, France, Italy, and Switzerland. This was pretty cool because those were all in our plan. And the guy at the front desk said we could take it because he couldn't read it anyways. lol. 

So at this time, our plan was to go see downtown Frankfurt and get to Heidelberg. So I booked a guest house in Dossenheim, Heidelberg for like 38 euros for 2 people. We didn't have the timeline for Frankfurt-Heidelberg train timetable, but the lady at the Frankfurt airport said that there are plenty of trains and they were going to be empty since it's Christmas time. From Heidelberg, we were going to go to Munich. 

Part III-1. Going over to Germany

After the breakfast in UK, we hopped on this empty plane to Frankfurt, Germany. Being the Christmas day and all, the plane was really empty.. people probably filled about 30%. It wasn't a huge plane, so my brother and I had the entire 6-seat row for ourselves. The flight didn't take that long, only about a couple of hours. The flight was at around 2 pm and landed just before 5 German time (Germany and UK has an hour time difference). During this comfy plane ride in a new Airbus 319, we were served a 'Christmas day cookie' by the flight attendants. It felt good, I must say. And this guy, from the row behind me came and sat by me complaining that the guy on his row was snoring. Our row had more than an extra seat, so we obviously let him sit, then I noticed his University of Nebraska shirt. So I asked him if he went there. He answered in obvious European accented English-but still good- that he studied there for a year. He was bald, looked to be late-20s, and was German (I asked him). He said he was from Munich, which was one of our stopovers, spoke French, German, English, and a little Spanish. He also said he worked at Gibraltar for this telecommunications company and was making good money. I told him that we got a hostel right near the main train station in Frankfurt, and he warned us that it is right in the middle of the red light district. ...but he also told us that the girls weren't too expensive, and he's visited there many times. I figured it's better to know some info about the place we'd never gone before.

As we landed in Frankfurt, the sun was already set, and we were hoping that my backpack would come out of quick so we can try to find our hostel. The airport was VERY empty like the plane ride and we were able to get through the customs pretty quickly. I've actually been in Frankfurt before, when I was coming back to the US after spending the summer in Korea in 2010. Then, I took the Korea-Japan-Singapore-India-Germany-NY-Atlanta route rather than Korea-Atlanta. Long story short, it was cheaper with Delta buddy passes, but took like 4 days. Anyway, the airport itself looked really different, probably because it wasn't packed like it was a couple years ago. As a result, there wasn't anyone at the baggage claim so I got my backpack right away and we started to look for the train station. Apparently we had to get to another terminal to get to the train station, and it took a while to figure that out. Finally we found the train station and went to the tickets office to validate our Eurail passes. 


If I haven't mentioned anything about Eurail passes in this blog, here's a quick info. About a month before our trip, I bought these Eurail 15-day Global pass Youth for $500+change each for me and my brother. They had the other options such as 3,4, or 5 country passes, or 10 day passes and such, but I thought this was the best deal. Youth is for those under 26 and this pass allows 'free' train rides in 22 countries (I hear there are more countries now). Youth pass means 2nd class and with Eurail passes, you can ride slow trains for free, but have to pay about 10~25 euros for fast trains. You have to have your passport at all times and it needed to be validated on the first day of travel. So, to ride the train from Flughafenbahnhof (airport train station) Frankfurt to Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof (central station) we needed to validate our passes. Luckily there was this nice lade who spoke good English at the tickets office and we were able to get answers like how many stations till Frankfurt Hbf., if we could ride for free, how to reserve other tickets (like 12/26 to Heidelberg), and etc. 


So, we went down to this really run-down platform and waited for this subway system (they called it S-Bahn). There were also some sketch homeless people walking (or sitting) around, so we were being very careful. The lady at the tickets office told us 3 stations, but the gap between the stations were pretty long and so we looked for the subway map as soon as we got in, after waiting about 5 minutes. And for some reason, we couldn't find what subway we were on, what station we got on at, and where Hbf was. And there was over 20 subway lined on that map. Luckily, there was this nice German gentleman who helped us get off at the Frankfurt Hbf (where everybody got off). The train was really run down too (the door was manual) and had some sketch people like this kid who sat in front of us with Beats by Dr. Dre headphones and kept staring at us nodding his head as he was listening some loud rap. He was white by the way, and we couldn't really find any African-European people in Germany in general. 


After we got off the train, we just followed the directions that I got from the hostelworld.com. It had detailed directions to the hostel turn by turn provided by the hostel itself. And.. this is what the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof looked like the day after. 

..And that's me walking. I should try to photoshop that pic so it'd look better. For whatever reason, we didn't take any picture from the plane ride until we got to the hostel. I think at the time we were pretty tired and were just focused on finding our hostel in the place where we didn't speak the native language. I guess somewhat it reminded me of my first day at Union Grove High School, when we focused on finding the right school bus to get us home. I'm counting about 22 pics for this next post coming up very soon. 

Sorry it took this long for this one, and few pics, I was busy writing personal statements and filling out resumes for med school. And although blogging takes time, I'm thinking I could take a break from studying and try not to forget English at the same time, so it's a win win. Wishing I was in the US watching the march madness--

Upcoming Posts..

Hey guys,


I've been extremely busy last couple of weeks and I was sick for like a week, so I haven't been posting anything.. The next post will probably be up around next Monday or so.
..But it's yall's spring break anyway, so I doubt you'll check it anyway. 


Tim

Part II-3. Let's Eat some British Breakfast

It had been a while since I wrote a post.. so I had to read the post that I posted. Wasn't hard though; I read the last sentence and knew exactly where I was. Before we get to that, my bad if you guys were waiting for my post. I had to take this Korean Proficiency test on Saturday in order to apply for med schools, but it was pretty hard, so I had to take a couple of days to take it in. Anyways...

 As I was saying, we were hungry, and there were lots of restaurants in the area that we could go to. I wanted some cheap, filling food, like some Mexican food. But.. my brother wanted breakfast.. hey, who doesn't like breakfast? Well, I don't really like breakfast that much. He was the older one though, so we went into this place called Huxley's Bar & Kitchen. I wish I'd taken a shot of the restaurant, but it wasn't looking that nice from outside anyways. I don't know if this is an Europe thing, but pretty much all the (nice) restaurants seemed to have menus outside for people to see what they want to eat, or if they can afford it (this is me). You can kind of see what the place looks like from the picture, but you see a couple of guys at the bar, and the entrance was to the right of that. We sat in the corner (always). 

 This guy came over to get the order almost immediately after we sat down. And started talking. I was holding my iPad, and he wanted to exchange breakfast for it. He was just joking, but kind of got scared for a second because he almost sounded serious. This guy. Anyways, I ordered 'The Big Breakfast' you see on the left except the sausages and this guy said, "you mean, 'The Great Britain Breakfast'?" I was like, "Yeah, I  guess?" This guy (don't know his name, gonna call him Tommy, although he looks more like Liam; I like Liam Neeson), he was literally talking to us for like 10 minutes talking about how we're from America (from the accent), how he came in at 5am, and how 'The GB Breakfast' is like the most typical breakfast you'd eat in UK. Tommy was a typical British guy though; he kept calling me and my brother 'mate'. 

Finally, Tommy got our orders in. I ordered that 'The GB Breakfast' and my brother ordered 'The GB Breakfast' without the beans and mushrooms, which was 'Huxley Single Breakfast'. It would've been a whole lot easier at the waffle house ordering that all star special. My brother also ordered a sweet tea (haha), and Tommy said, "You mean, like an iced tea with extra sugar? We've got Lemon and Peach, which one you want, mate?" I thought it was kind of funny how he said 'extra sugar', and my brother got that 'Peach flavored Iced Tea'. Just FYI, I'm reading off of a receipt that I kept. No way I can remember all the names (It's a great way to keep your memories, too). On the receipt it literally says, '1 GB Breakfast, 1 HUX SGL Breakfast, 1 Peach Iced Tea'. Now that I look at it again, Tommy's name was actually VIRU. Such a british name... NOT. What IS Viru anyway?

 Now we waited. This is actually the reason we got in here first place. If you remember, we wanted to eat, but we also wanted to kill time, too. There were lots of 'British' paintings/pictures on the wall. Maybe I'll visit this London Eye sometime.

 This was just an interesting pic. Don't know why it was there. I guess they were protesting about something by wearing speedos and bikinis.

 Thought this was a cool pic though. I guess this was London like a long time ago. 

The harry potter sauce? I think this was a steak sauce, but do they have these in America?

I guess I never took a closer look at splenda packets. And 'Apply liberally' sounded pretty weird to me, too.

 I know, right? I'm taking pics of sugar packets. The food sure took long enough. 

As much as I want to comment on every pic I've taken, It's kind of hard to do on pics like this one.

 FINALLY! First things first. This ain't a tailgate before Georgia game, but baked beans? And tomatoes? And mushrooms? The beans were pretty good though, to be honest. And tomatoes weren't bad either. It's just that I don't think I'd ever had beans and tomatoes for breakfast. It was kind of weird, but what the heck we're in Europe. 

The hash browns were very over-fried. I guess that's how brits like 'em. As for the eggs, I specifically asked Viru that what was the most popular type of eggs in UK. And he said it was fried over-medium. So there it was. He also told me to dip the toast in it with ketchup. Some of you may think that's nasty, but it was pretty good. The bacon was the bomb though.

 That stuff was good. I like my bacon to be soft rather than hard/overcooked. It also went pretty well with those whole mushrooms. 
This is my brother's plate.. I had a bite of that sausage, and it reminded me of how much I didn't like sausage. They tasted almost the same with the American ones. 

 Here's that 'Peach Tea'; maybe they actually brewed down the tea, cooled it down, and brought it; that takes about 30 minutes, right? I had a sip of it, and it was pretty good actually. But it cannot beat the strawberry lemonade from the Mama's Boy. That stuff is good, if yall haven't tried it. 

Even the napkin had the 'Great Britain' sticker on it, this restaurant was all about the British. 

Even though the toast wasn't toasted enough for my taste, toast & butter wasn't bad. Put the egg yolk and ketchup on it, it was even better. 

Finally the cool lighting. All in all the breakfast at Huxley's wasn't bad at all. The GB Breakfast was 7.75, Single Breakfast was 6.75, and the 'extra sugar' peach tea was 2.75, all in British Pounds. So it was a bit pricey (about $30 with tip) and we would regret this later, but I'd say it was better than sitting around for 4 hours doing nothing. If you want to visit Huxley's it's in Terminal 5, left hand side when you come out of the security, upstairs. Look for Tommy, and by that I mean Viru. I wanted to post this earlier so you guys could read it after classes, but I didn't wanna divide up the post again. I should warn you though, we did take some 3k pics, but they are not nearly as detailed as this first meal. Not even close. But there ARE 3k pics you're gonna see, so wait for 'em. 

Part II-2. Exploring the Heathrow Airport

After a thorough scanning of our stuff (twice), we finally got to our terminal and got us a couple of chairs, before I decided to kill some time by walking around the terminal. At this point, I had almost forgotten that it was Christmas. And obviously, the big trees reminded me. 

The tree might not look that big, but it was pretty dang big and was flashing.  

 This is pretty much what the terminal looked like. It had shops after shops for like 100 yards. And we're not talking about same-old Starbucks sitting in every five shops in Atlanta Concourses. It's more like a couple of duty-free stores in International wing in Hartsfield-Jackson E Concourse. But like 10 times bigger. It was more like a mall. 

 I don't know if you know, but I'm not real big on shopping. But there are some stores that I can go in & stay for hours such as Academy Sports, Dick's, and Best Buy. Well, there was this electronics store in here, and I decided I needed an extra microSD card cuz my phone was running out of spaces. It wasn't too overpriced, so it was a good buy.

I did other things too, like walking around sports stores overwhelmed by Manchester United stuff. I also bought some postcards (this is my tradition when I go overseas), and some key chains. 

Some Brits are also gangstas like some UGA athletes, or all of the athletes. I think I even saw Drew Butler wear these Beats by Dr. Dre once, and he's like the whitest athlete on campus. I remember them being quite expensive though, even more so than the US.






Another Christmas tree; I think that there were about three throughout the terminal. I'm sure there were more in other terminals though.

...And here is the pic of other terminal over the windows. Apparently, there are like 5 terminals in Heathrow, so that gives about 15 Christmas trees, pretty cool. There were all kinds of people at the airport; I noticed a high Indian/Middle Eastern population, people sleeping, college kids going on trips, and many different types of languages hovering around us. 

We were munching on the beef jerkies that we had for a while, but we got tired of it soon. So we decided to go to a restaurant to kill time and eat some good food. At least until now, money wasn't an issue. We wanted some GOOD (and filling) food. 

Part II-1. Getting into London

Originally, visiting London was not in the plan. This plan, however, was changed after I found the cheapest ticket to Frankfurt stopping over at LHR airport. Since we were already going to be in London, I looked for tickets that had 6+ hour stopover so we could have a chance to go out into the city real quick and see the Big Ben, the London Eye, whatnot. But I couldn't find such ticket, so we had to stay in the airport for 4+ hours. 


Getting into London via airplane was rough, at least for me anyway. I usually don't have any problem sleeping in airplanes, I usually take a nap at least. BUT, I couldn't sleep at all and was awake the ENTIRE way. oh well. About hour before landing they served us with breakfast. Though this was a 'light' meal, it was good nonetheless. Here's are some pics. 

It didn't look that good to start with, because they basically just threw the box at us, but It was quite good actually. The juices that you get in the airplanes are somehow always better than the store-bought ones; maybe that's just me. But that muffin with raisins in it was really good. I don't know about the name of the breakfast box though...

And apparently, Brits like raisins a lot. They just had like a box of raisins in it. I know the raisins are good for you (and they tell you on the box) but unlike Blair Walsh, I can make field goals. I don't know why. It's kind of hard to see, but those little baked-cracker-things on the bottom were good too. 

And... a few minutes later, we landed at London Heathrow International. Before we actually land though, remember I couldn't sleep? So I made a vague (pretty specific, actually) plan of our trip, while my brother was taking a nice nap. This is out of the journal. 

So, here's a rough plan as of right now (morning of Dec. 25th). Spend the night in Frankfurt, go around and see the city on the 26th and get to Heidelberg by the night of 26th. Visit the city/castle of Heidelberg on the 27th and get to Munich. Visit the Neuschwanstein Castle on the 28th in Fussen, Germany, and tour the city Munich until the 29th night when we get to Innsbruck, Austria. After that, Zurich 30th, Geneva 31st & 1st, Paris 2nd & 3rd, Milan 4th & 5th, Venice 6th, and Pisa & Rome on the 7th thru 9th. 

Once again, this was the rough plan AT THAT TIME. This does not guarantee that we went to every city/country on that list. From the start, we did not have any definitive plans except the fact that we were going to start the journey in Frankfurt, and end in Rome, from which we will fly to Korea. First things first, we were going to safely transfer first in London and explore the airport to see what Brits had to offer. 

 I already told you we arrived on this plane. After getting off, I was able to get Boingo Wi-Fi real quick with my phone and called my parents to let 'em know that we safely made it. FYI, Boingo offers $7.95/month plan for up to 3(I think) mobile devices. I used it a lot in public settings such as airports, train stations, even in the train once. I think it was worth it, but you HAVE to call them to cancel this 'recurring' subscription. 

 And we had to take a train to go from the C Gates to the Flight Connections. You'd think we were fresh off the plane and were very excited to be in England, right? Well, I guess my brother may have been, but not me, I was tired feeling as if I had pulled an overnighter (technically, I did).

We didn't get the pic of the train, but it was nothing special. Usual 3-4 cars linked train that you see in Atlanta or other large hub airports. 

 As we got out of the train, the transferring passengers were divided into groups, domestic or international. The airport, so far, looked pretty clean and efficient, and obviously waaay fancier than Atlanta. I really liked these lights. The picture doesn't exactly show the feel of these lights, but they were cool. 








               See? told you they were cool. Maybe not for some of you, but this kind of lighting gives a modern look when used repetitively like the picture below, but also natural feel because the pipes and a/c are exposed. It's 'open' if you will, makes me breathe easier. 

Now that I think back to it, there were a lot of people on a holiday like Christmas. This was kind of surprising because one of the reasons we didn't go into London was because I read that London is 'dead' on Christmas, meaning no transportation. But... I guess some people were busy getting to their homes to unwrap some presents with their kids. 

 We found our Frankfurt flight from one of those big transfer/departure screens and found out that our flight was flying out of the Terminal 5. Pretty much, we showed them the boarding passes and they checked the sizes of our carry-on bags to see if they fit in our new plane... and of course mine didn't. I wanted to keep it, but I had to check it in. This was good AND bad. It was good because I didn't have to watch my bag for 4 hours while my brother carried around his. And it was bad because we wasted a couple of minutes at the baggage claim in Frankfurt later. 


postscript; Just for you guys' info, I can write in detail now that I have a lot of pics to work with; they bring back my memories. And we did take some 3k pics, but some are repetitive and not as detailed as the first few days. And give me some feedbacks (as this post is what the rest'll look like), are these posts too long, short, lacking pics, too much writing? what do you guys think?