wäldchestag fest

I'm pretty much endlessly delighted by Germany's festival season. Any given weekend (and many weeks) in the spring and summer, there are a good half dozen festivals to choose from, from wine festivals to Grüne Soße Fest (not as exciting as it could have been) to Fressgass Fest (Pig-Out Alley Festival). And then, this past weekend, there was what I kept calling The Big Gay Festival in the Forest, a.k.a. Wäldchestag Fest (Forest Day Festival).

Wäldchestag is a traditional Frankfurt-specific holiday on the Tuesday after Pentecost, which used to be an official city holiday. All of Frankfurt's shops would close and everyone would go out to the city forest and picnic with their families in the afternoon. Offices don't close for it anymore, but there's still a weekend-long festival in the city forest, at Am Oberforthaus, which I went to twice (once on Sunday afternoon, once on Tuesday evening).

I hadn't really known what I was getting into, but it was pretty much a standard German festival -- a carnival with all the usual gingerbread heart trucks and bratwurst stands, carnival games, and tents full of people drinking sweetened apple wine -- only in the middle of the forest. As we wound through the woods, a Ferris wheel rose out of the trees; another time, we turned a corner to be faced with three large rainbow flags and the Rainbow Arena, which, depending on the time of day, played host to a bunch of tambourine-shaking women singing "My Girl" or a DJ spinning dance music. The crowd, during the daytime, was about fifty/fifty gay/families with children. The people-watching was marvelous, and the view from the Ferris wheel at night was fantastic: all of Frankfurt's skyline spread out before me.

land of knights and dragons

For Amanda's last full day in Germany, we went to the Rhine. I'd been to Burg Rheinfels, in St. Goar, with my high school German exchange group when I was sixteen, and I remembered it as being well worth visiting. It's always interesting to see how places differ from my memories of them. I wasn't a huge fan of Berlin in high school, but it grew on me in subsequent visits. I used to think Heidelberg was the most wonderful city known to man; it's too small for me now by far, and I think Freiburg is more charming. (Of course, after having lived there for a year, I'm biased.)

Burg Rheinfels held up quite well. We got some of the best weather we'd seen in Germany (which is really not saying much, but there were a few minutes of sun!), some excellent views of the Rhine, and the very end of a wedding. Burg Rheinfels seems to be a popular wedding spot, which I guess makes sense -- it's right in the heart of the Romantic Rhine.

There are all kinds of tunnels that are still open to the public, and we saw a good dozen kids with flashlights having an absolute blast exploring them. Katherine and I talked a while back about how Playmobil had always seemed very fake to us, very make-believe, but the Playmobil castle looks exactly like the town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber (tourist central, but charming, at least at age sixteen), and the Playmobil gas stations look very much like gas stations we saw in Freiburg -- and we pondered the following: Does Playmobil just seem like a plasticized version of real life to German children?

For most American kids, castles and dark, ancient forests are things that exist in the imagination or so far away that they might as well be unreal. For many German kids, the crumbling ruins of stone castles and the Black Forest, the land of Hansel and Gretel and all the dark Grimm Brothers tales, are places you go visit on the weekends with your parents, places you can grow up exploring. Watching the kids run around with their flashlights on Saturday, I was unbelievably jealous.

paris in nuclear winter

My friend Amanda came from New York on a two-week trip to visit me in Frankfurt and travel with me to Paris. Overall I'd estimate we had three days of some sunlight and about fifteen seconds of warm weather. Not the lovely vision of wearing sundresses in Paris that we had been hoping for!

Still, it's hard not to be charmed by Paris. Particular highlights: wandering around Montmartre Butte; Sacre-Coeur (early and often); riding the Batobus on its circle around the Seine; three-shared-entrees dinner at Café Constant (the quail stuffed with mushrooms and foie gras was out of this world); and of course the Eiffel Tower, by day and by night. We hadn't been certain we were going to go up the tower, but then it was so cheap to walk up, and the walking line was so short, that we went for it. We did not regret this choice! A panoramic view of Paris + a closer look at the framework of the Eiffel Tower + a workout -- what's not to like?

And if the weather wasn't as great as we had hoped, and we didn't make it to as many bakeries or lounge in as many parks as we'd originally intended*, well. That just means we'll have to go back.












* I also still haven't been to the Louvre, since I worked the day Amanda was there. Guess I should do something about that! I hear it's pretty decent, as museums go.

fakeland frankfurt