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Apr. 21, 2007 Regrettably I left Alexandria, Egypt, in 1991, long before the expiration of my one-year visa. My next port of call was to be Montreal, Quebec, Canada. However, I learned from a travel agency that only Lufthansa, the leading German airline, handles Alexandria-Montreal flights, and then only with the provision that the passenger remain in Frankfurt, Germany at least one day before boarding a plane for the second of two flights. Luckily for me I had a bicycle, so I was able to get about town much more easily than is usually the case when I get to the various cities where fortune has led me. I left Egypt with a stack of Egyptian 20-pound notes almost an inch thick. It was money enough to last six months. When I got to pre-euro Germany, it was exchanged for half a dozen 100-mark notes that were gone in a few days. For example, I had been paying $60 a month for two rooms in Egypt, but I paid $50 a night for one room in Germany, though it was cleaner and more modern. That is, I paid $50 a night for a couple of nights. Then I decided to sleep out in a park downtown known informally as the “Grünewald”, two or three nights at a time, between jaunts to Paris, Vienna, Rome and elsewhere. Then too the last week I was in Frankfurt, I took a room because I wanted to take advantage of the wonderful shopping available to buy and try clothes. The best I could do was $35 a night with a shared bath. I looked all over town for a room. Mostly there were no vacancies. I recall one hotel, which was just an 80-year-old three-story red-brick apartment building carved up into a number of rooms. The elderly male receptionist quoted me $100 (157 marks) a night for a room with a shared bath. I simply couldn’t believe it. Anyway, my favorite place in Frankfurt was a street called Zeil, which is lined with full-block department stores one after the other; I counted ten. For a town of fewer than 700,000, with a metropolitan population of 1,500,000, this was remarkable. Frankfurt might rank with Chicago, London, Paris or New York in this regard, outdoing Los Angeles and putting Phoenix to shame. Zeil, once a street, has been converted into a cobblestone pedestrian mall, all very scenic, with traditional German architectural motifs. At one end stands the Old Opera House and there is a theater there that at the time was featuring a play by Bertolt Brecht. I know so little German that it would have been a waste of time to attend. Giving off from the Old Opera House Square was a diagonal street featuring old-fashioned German retail businesses, like bakeries, meat markets and gift shops. There were vendors on the sidewalk. The Frankfurt skyline is full of tremendous skyscrapers, some of which approached or passed 100 stories. One building I frequented was the train station, as I left and returned to town again and again. It featured such conveniences as showers and coin-operated lockers, which are a thing of the past in the US. In cycling about town, I noticed many fashionable neighborhoods, like restored sections of an inner city, with elegant boutiques and restaurants, not unlike the Upper East Side in Manhattan. However, most of the neighborhoods were lower-middle- to middle-middle-class, with red brick apartment buildings, black asphalt streets and cast-iron lampposts. Frankfurt ’s rapid transit system, which is a subway downtown but at surface level in the farther districts, was expensive. I paid a fare of $2.40 a ride at a time when New York was charging $1.40. Out in the suburbs, like Praunheim, there were charming German-style houses, which however were generally small compared with houses in American suburbia. In the surrounding woods, discreetly hidden among thickets, were clusters of tiny houses, 10 by 10 feet, with high chain-link fences all about. Apparently, the lower class lives there. This would be analogous to an American trailer court, except that each house was about one-third the size of a large mobile home. Frankfurt has a zoo, but it was smaller than Berlin Zoo, which I also visited during that trip. I frequented the public library in Frankfurt, and found several excellent bookstores, one of which had four levels with a basement served by escalators, with easy chairs and coffee on each level, very much like Santa Monica ’s new Barnes and Noble Bookstore. Food was sky-high. If you want to eat German cuisine like Sauerbraten or Hasenpfeffer, in a dining room in an old-fashioned house, you may have to pay $30, $40, $50 or more for one person. You won’t find anything cheaper. A plate of fried rice, at a Chinese restaurant, was $7 or $8, compared with $3 in the US and 50¢ in China. Big Mac’s went for about $5. I recall that at McDonald’s, coffee was $1 for seven ounces, with no refills, compared with 75¢ in the US for 10 ounces with a refill. I was attacked twice in Frankfurt. Finally, one Sunday morning I cycled out to Frankfurt International Airport with two large bags strapped to my carrier. The awesome airport seemed to go on for miles and miles, and I wondered if I could find the right place. Somehow I managed finally, and later in the day, having gained time by flying with the sun, we put down in Maribel International Airport near Montreal, in the early afternoon. I would have stayed longer in Germany, as I had a summer ahead of me, but the prices for everything were much higher than I was willing to pay. Anyway, I was prospecting for places where I might like to live, and all other considerations aside, it is just too cold there. Once you’ve lived in places like Honolulu, it’s hard to find a good reason to live in a place like Frankfurt. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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