Frankfurt-am-main the big smoke.

The skyline is tall for european standards, true story

The main attraction to Frankfurt is that it is the air-transportation hub of central Europe. This provided me with a good place to start my journey towards the main objective of my trip being Russia. Seeing I landed in Frankfurt it has given me good opportunity to go further into Germany and explore around here for a while. I have 5 days to spend in Germany so to maximize what I’d get out of this visit I kept Frankfurt to a minimum as quite frankly it is lacking in interesting things.

The euro is strong in Frankfurt

Arriving at 5 am I booked myself into the Frankfurt hostel for a night. This gave me enough time to see Frankfurt and then an opportunity to catch up on some much needed sleep. Frankfurt itself is the financial centre of Europe only second to London supposedly. This shows in the skyline, it is described as the Manhattan of Europe (nicknamed mainhatten).

Unfortunately it fails to compare to Manhattan. I haven’t actually been to Manhattan, but have been to Chicago, San Francisco, Vancouver, Singapore, all of which are way more like Manhattan than Frankfurt. Frankfurt has only one really tall tower and the small quantity of the rest of them are of average height.

This is a cathedral in Frankfurt

The next biggest attraction of the city is its old quarters and the museums. I did enjoy seeing the few remnants of long ago in the city as it was my first encounter with such old relics, although there is nothing super impressive. I decided to skip going to any museums as all seemed too specialist and small. Side note: you can supposedly by a day pass to go visit all the museums which may be worth it.

The town hall

The queen of Germany or something

By 2pm I was beyond tired, and so went back to the hostel and slept for the next 17 hours to force myself into waking up at a natural time, although this was about 3 pm NZ time, so was very unnatural. The hostel provided a delicious breakfast in the morning (being cornflakes, coffee and toast), delicious because I love cereal and hadn’t had it in a few days. But time being limited I departed on a train to Dresden to see a more interesting city.

Maxin' in Romerberg

Language barriers always being interesting, the ticket collector asked me to show my ticket in Germen. Stupidly I said ‘huh’ which obviously isn’t really explaining that I can’t speak English, and so he thought I was a bit deaf with all the music playing in my head phones so repeated very loudly in Germen again to give him my ticket. Luckily I assumed he was asking this question and so showed him the correct document.

Costs:
Trains: From airport to city 3.50 euro = $7
From Frankfurt to Dresden 82 euro = $160
Hostel 18 euro = $36
Food for one day 6 euro = $12
Running total = $3824