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.