Today was the big day! It was time to go on my adventure to Germany! I was super excited! I packed up all of my last minute things and had my bags ready to go! In the Calgary Airport I said my goodbyes to my family and off I went!
After getting through security and sitting at the gate for a while, I realized that this was the first time that I had ever flown by myself. This was an interesting realization considering I had already travelled quite a bit in my lifetime. This made me even more excited to be travelling. Time seemed to fly by (see what I did there) and then we were up, up, and away. On the red-eye flight I seemed to get a lot of sleep. Before I could say bratwürst, we had landed in Frankfurt!
My friend Mel and I had chose a spot in the airport that we could meet. We figured that both of our flights would be landing in the same terminal. But of course, it couldn't be that easy. I realized that I had landed in the other terminal and I had to take the "sky-train" over to our meeting spot. Once I got there, I was checking all of the arrivals notices and couldn't seem to find Mel's. I asked the information booth to see if her flight had landed yet and it had! I knew Mel was in the airport somewhere… but now I had the task of trying to find her. I went to our meeting point and she was not there. I decided to wait there for a while. Still no Mel. I walked around in the area going up and down stairs trying to access WiFi so that I could message her. Finally, I was about to go and wait at the spot again and I heard my name being called. Sure enough we had found each other! We quickly purchased our train tickets and were on our way!
We took the train from the airport Flughafen station to the main station (Hauptbanhof). We were already baking in the heat. We both had our Alberta clothes on, which consisted of full pants and T-shirts. The 32 degree Celsius weather with full strength humidity wasn't expected. We tried to orient ourselves to find our hotel so that we could drop off our luggage and see Frankfurt for the rest of the day. Our mis-orientation and lack of sleep had somehow landed us in a very sketchy area of town. It seemed to almost be the red-light district of the area. Mel and I were desperately trying to find our way out of this area to find our hotel. It was evident that we stuck out like sore thumbs with our travel packs and cameras in tow. A man with a beer in hand and one in his pocket approached us and started speaking in German. Of course we didn't understand and asked "sssppreekken see English?". As we watched people on the street involving themselves in illegal activity, the nice drunk man gave us directions. He took the phone from my hand to look at the map that I was looking at. This worried me and I ensured that I was at an angle that he wouldn't be able to run off with my phone! He quickly pointed us in a direction. Desperate to get out of there we said "Duunnkkka Shen" and followed his directions with a little more speed in our step. Finally, we had oriented ourselves and found our hotel. Luckily it was a few neighbourhoods over from the seedy part of town that we had wandered through. By this time the sweat had soaked through a few layers of clothes and we were grateful to be able to change into some lighter clothes.
We looked at a map and decided that we were close enough the main square in Frankfurt to walk. We walked about 2km to the Römer Square. I had been to the square a year ago with my family on our trip to Ireland. It was a really cool area with traditional German buildings. We decided to stop for an apple wine (apfelwein). Since we were hungry, we also stopped for a quick bite to eat and our first German bratwürst. It was so tastey! I also remembered that there was a Häagen Dazs up the road. We grabbed a delicious ice cream which finally cooled us off. We dragged our feet around the city and crossed a bridge with a number of different love locks. We were quite tired and wanted to get up early, so we headed back to our hotel for an early nights sleep.
Our adventure had begun! What a great time already!