My first step back into the Western world after having spent 18 months in Asia. It was nice! Fresh cool air, clean streets, undercrowded. Frankfurt was a beautiful city, with beautiful modern and classic architecture. I'm really glad we had the chance to stop by this wonderful city, even if only for a day (the hotel rates during the week are astro-comical). Click ahead to read a bit more about this city, and to see a few pictures and notes from Sejin.
As I said in the last post, I wasn't feeling all that great. I had a case of the Delhi Belly. I spent a significant amount of time near the washroom and it made for a pretty boring trip for the duration of our stay in Germany. My radius from the hotel was about 2 or 3 kilometres.. heh. Thankfully that was cleared up by the time we arrived in Iceland. Now, onto the rest of the post...
We couldn't help but make this face when we arrived in Frankfurt where people don't push us or run us over and instead of grimy limping dogs without owners, every dog here was clean and had an owner, not like India, Nepal or Tibet. We were in awe of the cleanliness, quietness, and spotless air of Frankfurt and almost burst in tears. "Thank god, we are in heaven now!" Sebastien and I couldn't believe ourselves in a land with cool autumn breeze yet it is not very far from India.
Nothing can stop me.
DB(Deutsche Bahn) Station. The most complicated station I've ever seen. You'll have more possibility to be stricken by lightning than getting on the right train in this station.
I don't remember seeing even a single word of English in this train station, foreigner un-friendly.
Leave a message...Beep!
The following pictures are from Mainz, Germany. A small city just outside of Frankfurt, where the river Rhine meets the river Main. It's a beautiful quaint little town with more of an ancient feel than Frankfurt. I'd go back :)
I remember Sebastien saying, "It's so strange to see a white guy cleaning up garbage." after spending 1.5 years in Korea and the journey through China, Tibet, Nepal, and India. He forgot the big western community's life. This picture is not a routine dog poop picking up scene. There was a group of Hippies walking as if someones chasing them to catch a train. But they couldn't see how their dog desperately wanted to poop. So the man who has its leash pulled so hard, didn't care too much of the state of his dog that was half walking and half sitting on the floor. The dog finally pooped while walking, dragging its bum close to the ground and everyone saw except the owner. Then a guy who passed by the owner screamed at him and made him come back to the site to clean up the mess. It took a long time to bring the owner to the place to clean up. But on that day, I learned that German Hippies can't get away from their responsibility in German society.
As a side note to this story, the janitor came by shortly before the owner made his way back, and I could see him just about ready to shed a tear or two at the idea of having to clean up smeared poop from the tile. I'm glad the owner did the right thing.
The picture above and the picture of the girl in black and white was taken with a cheap old lens I bought while walking around with Sejin. it's a Sigma 100-200mm f/4.5 and I think it cost about 40 Euro. I had a bit of fun with it as it was definitely the longest reaching lens I had in my pack (the second longest being the 135mm f/2.0).
As always, if you would like to see the other photos from this trip, please see the album posted on Facebook. Take care for now!
Sub