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