one year

   


   





As of last Thursday, November 4th, I've been in Frankfurt for a full calendar year. In that time, I've been to Bangladesh, India, Paris (twice), Salzburg (twice), Spain, Sylt, Switzerland, and all over Germany; I've also gone home for one week, and to my other home for two. Moving to Frankfurt in November was not the most fun thing I've ever done, and leaving NYC was a little rough at first, but I've really ended up liking FFM. And wow, did that year go by quickly.

o suns and skies

Frankfurt might have had a pitiful four-week summer, but it's made up for that a tiny bit by having a long and excellent fall.

an hour in the eighth

   



Work ate me a little over the past week or so, and I've only just now gotten around to uploading the pictures from when I went on a one-day business trip to Paris two Wednesdays ago. My coworker Anna and I were lucky enough to sneak in an hour of wandering around the 8th arrondissment after we were done with meetings: down the Champs-Élysées and over to the Seine, with views of the Eiffel Tower. Not bad, not bad.

over the city

In spite of having worked here for almost a year, I'd never been to the observation deck on the top of the Main Tower until this week, when I met my old roommate Sandra for lunch. It was a bright sunny day and very windy fifty-four stories up. Afterwards we had focaccia from Strahmann on Kaiserstraße, which we enjoyed in the (much less windy) sunlight of Goetheplatz.

park

Sunday was exactly my idea of a perfect fall day: warm and sunny and shockingly blue-skied during the day and a bit cool at night -- sweater and jeans and scarf weather. There's a fall festival going on in town at Roßmarkt with amazing fresh-pressed apple juice and decorative gourds for sale and displays involving tractors and a mother and baby cow parked in a pen at Hauptwache. I'm a little in love with this kind of fall.

da liegt man nicht eng

I somehow did not expect visiting Dachau to be as emotional an experience as it was. In spite of having lived in Germany for a couple of years in all, I'd never been to a concentration camp before. I was glad we went.

The title of this post is from the Paul Celan poem Todesfugue (in English here), which has a refrain that was in my head the whole time we were at Dachau:

dein goldenes Haar Margarethe
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith

ein prosit

   

One of the most remarkable things about Oktoberfest is how quickly it changes. One moment it's ten in the morning and the tent is almost completely empty, and you're eating your Weißwürste and Brezel and drinking your Frühstücksmaß and thinking that Oktoberfest is really much more low-key than it was four years ago; the next moment it's the middle of the afternoon and you're on your third Maß and your fourth beer tent and you can't find a table because it's a huge roiling party and your friend is being whisked away by a herd of Italians who want to take pictures with girls in Dirndls and you're befriending Australians and stealing their hats; and then suddenly it's three in the morning and you're waking up in the tent where you're spending the night and you're digging in your purse, where you discover a Burger King bacon cheeseburger you have no memory of purchasing for yourself. Which you then eat, delighted. Such is the way of Oktoberfest.

welcome to hostival hilton

   

This is where we spent two nights in Munich. I know what you're thinking: There is no way Kelly and Ann paid 44,- euro a night each to stay in a tent in a gravel parking lot out back of a clubbing area, particularly not with the added information that this was an establishment run by a bunch of drunken 25-year-old boys dressed in scrubs who would, without prompting, tell you that they'd drunk at least seven Maß (one-liter beers) at Oktoberfest during the day, and point to the seven hash marks on their wrist to prove it. "There were more," I was solemnly informed, "but the ink absorbed into my skin. That's what ink does." (Generally I thought that was only what ink did when a needle was also involved, but hey, who am I to argue with a drunken murse?)

I would never want to stay at Hostival again, but at the same time, after the initial first hour of "what in the world are we doing here?" and subsequent extreme lowering of expectations, we actually had a fabulous experience. Maybe I'm not getting too old for hostel culture after all?