christmas market season approaches

The Christmas market doesn't officially open until Wednesday, but the Römer area is completely packed with people setting up stalls and people watching them set up stalls. (This made it difficult to take a picture of any of the stalls; all of my pictures ended up with randoms wandering into the frame.) The Weihnachtsbaum is looking more and more decorated -- not sure if it is going to get more decorated than it currently is. I'll just have to keep wandering by to check.

Meanwhile, the path along the banks of the Main continues to be one of my very favorite things about Frankfurt. I'm taking advantage of the weather being pleasant(ish) enough to ride my bike to work. I mark the distance to work by bridges: my street becomes a bridge right at the point where I get on the river path, then I pass two more before I approach Untermainbrücke, the bridge that turns into the street my office building is on. Until a couple of days ago, I hadn't really thought about how good it was to be in another place with a river; but there's something really beautiful and awesome about bridges, in New York in particular, being able to count the bridges from downtown going up (Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg) . . . and though the names of the bridges here don't come naturally to me yet it's comforting that they're here, in some gut-level way.