The Great Affair: Frankfurt, Day One

I wish Day 1 of Frankfurt had lasted only one day. Unfortunately when travelling on a college budget this is not usually the case. Thursday night, my friend Sam and I left to go to the train station. We made it in to Stansted (with several other groups of Harlaxton students travelling across Europe) around eleven P.M. Our flight left around eight in the morning. Sleeping on the floor, we quickly realized, was going to be impossible, so I got a lot of reading done.

None of it my assigned reading, of course.

The next morning we flew to Frankfurt with relative ease, nearly dead on our feet. We arrived only to realize that the cheap flight to Frankfurt actually goes somewhere almost two hours outside of Frankfurt.

On that long bus ride we were sitting between a crying baby and a man mixing his own music without headphones, yet we still managed to sleep the entire time.

Then, the bus stopped at Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof (or, Central Train Station).

Suddenly, we had arrived in a country with only some English-speakers. We arrived without a map or any kind of German-English dictionary. We had a hostel but we didn't know where it was, and for that matter, we didn't know where we were. We were armed only with a weekend’s worth of apples and goldfish crackers.

Finally a hotel concierge took pity on us and directed us to the right hostel.

Upon arriving, we promptly passed out for four hours.

When we awoke we decided to try to find Main Tower. Main Tower is to Frankfurt what the Arch is to St. Louis, the Eye is to London, or the Space Needle is to Seattle. Basically, you pay for an awesome view. Unfortunately it wasn’t on any of our newly-acquired maps and no one in Frankfurt knew what we were talking about.

We somehow managed to find our way through the public transportation to the right area of town. From there we were walking into random towers asking “Main Tower?” and getting laughed at.

The view we finally got was worth it, though.