Frankfurt, Germany

Hi there! We made it to Europe! I know that I'm posting this late but we've been busy! And you know what they say, better late than never:)

Day 1: A self-guided church walking tour

Date: Tuesday, August 29th, 2023

Step count: 16,783

We made it to Europe! And we made it very early in the morning! Our flight landed at 8 AM (right on time! Go Air Canada!) and we started our journey into the city of Frankfurt. The Frankfurt Airport experienced some flooding last week, and by some, I mean waterfalls coming down their escalators, but thankfully there were no indoor swimming pools by the time we arrived. We passed through passport control with no issues, they don't seem to care how long I plan to stay so I might just stay forever! Collecting our bags was a breeze too and we got into a taxi to head to our hotel. Our taxi took us through/to the red light district and dropped us off right across from "The Sex Inn". That's where our hotel was. Our hotel was thankfully not "The Sex Inn" but we had a fantastic view of "The Sex Inn". So the neighbourhood was a little rough but our hotel was good, very comfy. But we couldn't check in until 3 PM and at this point it was barely 9 AM, so we took off into the city for what would be a self-guided church walking tour.

We left our bags at the hotel (& prayed they would be there when we got back) and started walking down the street passing brothel after brothel, sketchy person after sketchy person. Thankfully only two blocks away was the financial/business district so "safety" wasn't too far away :) We got a great cup of coffee to keep us awake then walked through some parks on our way to Main Tower. Main Tower is the tallest building in Frankfurt that has public access at the top with an observation deck. There is obviously a competition in Frankfurt to have the tallest building but this one has done a very good job at monetizing their tall building and charging tourists 10€ each to see the views.

The next stop was the Opera House or Alte Oper (in German), a beautiful old building with cute cafes on the cobblestone streets beside it. We weren't allowed in but just looking at the outside was amazing.

We continued our walk through the "Wall Park" which led us past more beautiful old buildings and took us to our first church of the day, The Imperial Cathedral of Saint Bartholomew, or commonly, the Frankfurt Cathedral. Which despite the name, is actually not a cathedral (fun fact!). This church is the largest religious building in the city and was the election and coronation church of the Holy Roman Empire. The church was built in the 14th and 15th centuries and has had some renovations done more recently due to a fire in 1867 and the Allied bombings in WWII.

After the first church, the churches just kept coming. It was like a scavenger hunt and we needed to find them all! We went to Alte Nikolaikirche, Liebfrauen, Evangelische St. Katharinenkirche.

Church finding made us quite hungry so we sat down in the square and had some Apfelwein (rough translation to apple wine or cider, but slightly less good) and "pizza". I wouldn't call it actual pizza because the dough was almost like tortillas... I don't know but it was pretty good! And we chose the right time to sit down too because it started POURING rain. So we waited out the rain and planned our route walking past the water back to our hotel.

This time on the walk back we tried to find a route passing the smallest number of brothels possible. It turns out that such a route doesn't exist, you just have to embrace it and walk with your head up. And avoid being outside around dark at any cost.

So we checked in and confirmed that the inside of the hotel, more specifically the inside of our room is a better place to be than outside. We took showers, sat down and tried our best to stay awake. It was around 5 PM now so we decided to have some dinner to keep us up and to fix our sleep schedule to beat the jet lag!

We headed out to have some Thai for dinner, in Germany, as Canadian tourists, I know. But it was very tasty! And we timed this meal super well too because it started raining again just as we sat under the umbrellas. This time it was raining quite a bit harder so we decided to eat inside but I am impressed that in Germany, Kimmy and I have the ability to control when it starts raining by simply sitting down at a restaurant!

After our dinner, we headed back to the hotel nice and early (safety first!) and went to bed very early!

Today in summary: 16,000 steps between 9 AM and 3 PM is quite impressive, and tiring, but Frankfurt has some amazing churches (and other sites too).

Day 2: More sights, (seemed like) Less walking

Date: Wednesday, August 30th, 2023

Step count: 17,894

Good morning! Well not quite because despite our early bedtime we slept until 10:30 AM. But the 14 hours of sleep was just what we needed! Today we planned some activities rather than aimless walking to see some cool sites in Frankfurt. We started by walking the opposite way from the day before to see the Natural History Museum or the Senckenberg Naturmuseum (I bet you didn't think you were going to get your daily German lesson from this blog).

We stopped to have breakfast, or more like brunch, well really more like lunch at a cute cafe. The crazy thing I found out here is that pancakes are served with chocolate syrup and not maple syrup, crazy!!

So with full and caffeinated bellies, we headed to the Naturmuseum! This place was totally awesome! They had tons of dinosaur bones, thousands of taxidermied animals, and even a replica of Lucy (the first hominid). My anthropology teacher from Grade 10 and my Vertebrate Design professor would be proud of how excited I was to see all this stuff!

But the fossils kind of speak for themselves so here are a few of my favourites:

1. Diplodocus - the longest dinosaur discovered to date and this is the only representation of the dinosaur outside of the US!

2. Triceratops - self-explanatory super cool

3. Fin whale - the second largest animal in existence today (second only to the blue whale). These guys can be up to 27m long!!!

And finally the museum's depiction of biodiversity. The museum has had over 40 million exhibits/species over the past 200 years of research history and they put together a 15m by 4m wall of some of the species. It was pretty cool! I even got two humans in my picture!!

Ok so enough nerdy-ness and on to the rest of the day! We walked through the more residential area of Frankfurt to our afternoon boat cruise. We passed the Opera house again but this time a wine festival was being set up so we decided we HAD to come back for that!!

We got to the iron bridge (Eiserner Steg, sounds pretty cool in German) and boarded our cruise that goes up and down the River Main. We got to see the beautiful Frankfurt skyline which has a couple of skyscrapers and has earned the city the nickname "mein-hattan" (like Manhattan, get it?). We had our German beer and Frankfurter because it seemed like the thing to do and enjoyed the narration of the buildings and sites on the waterfront. We got to see the row of museums, the shipping port of Frankfurt, the coal power generation plant, some locks (called watergates here), and some other pretty buildings!!

At the end of our-100 minute tour, we decided it was time to go back to the wine festival. It was like it was made for us. So we wandered up the street that must have had about 35 tents/bars of different kinds of wine. We found one that had an open picnic table and we enjoyed a very nice glass of rose. But our time at the wine festival couldn't be done quite so soon so we found another tent that was attached to a restaurant to enjoy a glass of Reisling (so German!!) and had some Greek food (not so German). By this point, it was nearing dark so we headed back to our hotel before the neighbourhood got too scary!!

Summary of day 2: Spacing out 17,000 steps over a whole day with some sitting in between is much more manageable. Fossils are super cool and I think a science degree is the thing for me!!

The next day we have a train scheduled at 10 AM to take us to our next destination of our European adventure, Cologne, Germany!

PS. Here's one more fossil :)