Suddenly Frankfurt
Despite popular demand, Huw and I have written more about our experiences in Germany!
Second Day in Germany! Though, one might reasonably call this our first day, as it's the first time we were fully capable of taking in our surroundings.
I'm always surprised when I come to Germany by how clean everything, and how good the infrastructure is that they have to keep it that way. It's not just that there are plenty of bins in the right places, but that all of them are recycling bins. There are about 6 varieties of bin in Germany, one for each type of recyclable material and then one for everything else. Also, every time you buy a drink from a shop that comes in a bottle, you'll also be paying a Pfand, a small deposit on the bottle itself. If you want the Pfand back, you return the bottle. Just little things like that make me realise how much more efficient everything could be. It's easy to make people want to be environmentally friendly by making it more difficult and expensive not to be.
Huw worked out that 20 Baht Coins work in vending machines over here as 2 Euro coins! That's a saving of, oh, two Euros? You didn't hear it from here, though. Speaking of savings, alcoholic drinks in the Youth Hostel are outlandishly cheap. We can get a bottle of Beck's here for a mere 1.50 Euros, or around $2.50. That's about as cheap as our six-pack prices, perhaps cheaper. Not to mention that it tastes so much better, as it's all made locally. I think they keep the good stuff for themselves. So, last night we dutifully held up our Australian reputation by being the only people drinking heavily in the bar, getting over a litre of top-notch German beer for less than $8.00
Warning - Phenomenally Priced German Beer Ahead!
Solution - So buy more!
I've been trying teach Huw some German, as well. We're starting with the more polite expressions, such as Entschuldigung (excuse me), Tut mir leid (I'm sorry) and Ich spreche kein Deutsch (I don't speak German). I've been trying to get him to pronounce them all correctly, but we were having a little trouble. Arguably, the worse he manages to say the last one, the greater effect it has, but I'm a bit of a stickler for correctness of punctuation (I would say that I am of a particular political persuasion that tends to be... unforgiving when it comes to correctness and discipline, but my current geography forbids jokes on the matter). Anyway, I taught him little methods to remember each of them by; if you need to push in front of someone, you say Entschuldigung, if you accidentally knock someone, you say Tut mir leid, and when your target emits a stream of German curse words you follow up with Ich spreche kein Deutsch. So, Huw spent a good twenty minutes pushing me and cutting in front of me so he could use his newfound phrases. Says Huw - "I will only use this power to annoy!" I've been trying to teach him the German for "I am stabbing myself in the eye" but he flatly refuses to cooperate. What do you do with someone who has no passion for learning?
The great thing about youth hostels is the kinds of people you meet. In our room, we had a Japanese skater who had precisely no knowledge of English before leaving on holiday, and only a nominal knowledge of German. He works in an amusement park in Osaka (apparently Osaka is "number 1 better than Tokyo!") and spent two weeks here, and was heading back today, and has spent a day or two checking out skate parks in a whole bunch of European cities. The only English he knew is what he taught himself on the trip. He would say individual English words and sometimes act things out to communicate with us. In one situation, Huw brought out his umbrella, then told our Japanese friend what it was. He got excited and started acting like a zombie, then said the word "Biohazard!" See, he was referring to the Umbrella Corporation from the Resident Evil games (called "Biohazard" in Japan), who are the shadowy omnipresent organisation that does everything from selling soft drink to creating hordes of nigh-unstoppable mutant humans bent on the consumption of raw flesh. They seem to do the latter with alarming regularity.
Here is our Japanese friend!
I digress.
After our friend stopped acting like a zombie, he explained (somewhat falteringly) that he was leaving to go back to Osaka today, and bestowed upon me the Golden Lock of Osaka, the padlock that he was using that is completely gold in colour. We shook hands, took photos and he left, leaving a permanent image in our minds. Another person we met was a German who'd got an exchange to work with BMW in California, and was staying here while his visa got arranged. So yeah. Youth hostels - pretty awesome.
It's probably time that I got around to walking around the actual city. We haven't actually done any of that yet.
Buahhahahaha, Tim is reading my difficult handwriting so Huw takes over computer to talk about walking around the city.
When we first walked into the city, out of the train station, we were immediately assaulted by the red light district, promising us "Girls Girls Girls" and "Sexy Americans". I was a little suprised by this, given that it was 4pm on a Wednesday afternoon. However we soon left all that behind, at least I thought we did until this morning, when, after heading into the city, we managed, either by chance, subconscious desire or simply by following a path we had already trod, to walk straight through that same red light district again. Tim was the navigator and he insisted that it was accidental, however I am starting to have my own suspicions about that boy. Passing through we noticed the Royal Inn, we weren't quite sure whether it was simply an unlucky establishment that had suddenly discovered a red light district going around it, or simply more subtle than the nearby Sex Inn, which left little question as to its purpose.
After all the laughs we had through that seedy area, and watching what we suspected was a dognapping in progress we headed for the tallest building in the city. The name eludes me but it was something quite impressive, or at least something german probably(given the circumstances). Unfortunately however the building we were heading for turned out to be just some office building and the actual really tall building with the viewing deck on top was somewhere completely different. After consulting the map, something we arguably should have done, rather than just heading for the tallest building in sight, which in retrospect seemed like a much more sensible idea than it was, we arrived at our target, that german-ey and probably quite impressively named building or something. Deploying our technically invalid student cards we even avoided paying full fare, like any good backpacker should. The view was simply amazing, I was stunned by how flat everything is. From 200 meters up you can see a long way and there were only two blemishes on the monotonous flat ground one in each direction that would probably only be the elevation of Kings Park above the river. I took photos however they really cannot do it justice. We hung about up there a little awestruck until clouds came over and a wind blew up and it was suddenly rather cold, and after two flights of stairs, one elevator ride and 3 poppings of ears we were back on the ground. Interestingly we were subjected to a metal detector as we went in and intructed to remove all metal objects from our person. I was told it was ok to keep my money purse on and I forgot to take off my watch, not to mention my metal buttoned jeans and belt, only giving up my camera and wallet, however I still failed to set off the alarm. It was a little weird though, I am not sure what they were screening for with the whole detector business and going through Tim's bag. I guess it is a mystery whose answer will remain hidden in the depths of the minds of the people who work there and whoever told them what to do.
We went up this tower, thanks to the power of TECHNOLOGY! and STUDENT CARDS!! AND OUR TERRIBLE LIES!!!
This is the view from the tower! You can see the youth hostel we were staying at from here. It's just to the right of centre a bit. Juuuust below that huge building shaped like a brick. There, you got it now.
With little else planned we decided to head for an odd looking tower we spied from the observation deck. Sadly this was off the edges of Tim's map so we headed to the Opera House which was a convenient landmark to lead us to what was known as "That weird tower" how mysterious, oooooooooo! The opera house was simply stunning, we went into a small section of it that was converted into a cafe and had delicious hot chocolate while we admired the architecture and listened to operatic music that seemed to simply emanate from the walls, as if so many years of singing had impregnated the place with it's soul or there were just some speakers around, one of those two. I now hand back to Tim, as he has returned from the shower, or gay sex, if only because I have yet to question his sexuality, and above even managed to imply that he may be interested in sleeping with women, buahahaha. Oh, and another rule if I am also to work on this journal, No deleting Mr. Tim, and that sword DOES cut both ways. What happens in Europe, stays on the internet, apparently.
I have a sneaking suspicion that this journal will rapidly decline into a series of invectives directed towards whoever isn't currently writing. Oh well, on with the wordening.
We wandered around looking for a department store for a while, so that we could buy some essentials such as shaving cream, books to write in, and playing cards. In short order we found one; apparently we'd been walking neatly around the main shopping centre for the last hour while trying desperately to find it. We entered via the basement entrance, which we got into through the local underpass. All throughout German cities at almost every intersection, there will be underpasses that are generally filled with newsagents, bakeries and the like. It's almost like an undiscovered city, and many of them will have connections to subways, so you could quite reasonably go about your life without ever seeing the sun. Though I guess doing such a thing isn't very reasonable at all, really.
In the department store, I whetted my German skills yet again to ask where playing cards would be sold. In true department store fashion, the first person I asked directed me over the other side of the store, while the second person I asked directed me right back to the first one. *sigh*. An interesting thing we noticed was that the women's bathing outfits were located in an area labelled "Men's World". Fair enough, I suppose. In the end, we only managed to find some books to write in before declaring that we'd had enough trying to get some sense out of the Germans and wandered out. I tried once again to get playing cards later on, but the woman in there directed me towards the department store we'd just left. Do Germans even have playing cards? I know they use different suits, like bells, acorns and horseshoes. The fact they haven't standardised suits with the rest of us implies that they wouldn't import cards from China like the rest of the world does, and so playing cards probably don't feature heavily in the German way of life. Oh well. We checked out a few more stores in our travels, a bakery and a butcher, which Huw was suitably impressed with. They are pretty impressive though; I remember there being a German store back in Mt Lawley by the name of Elmar's, I think. They're like that here, but far larger and with much better food. They are like shrines to good food, overflowing with a cornucopia of deliciousness. The Germans, they know how to eat.
Men's World! With Ladies' Swimsuits! Clearly we are in the right place.
One of the problems inherent with travel is part where you actually travel. Over the next few weeks we will spend many hours sitting around in transit, and to help the time go by it's more or less essential to have a good book. Huw had only brought one book with him, and the only books I had brought were in German, so we decided to make haste to the local British Bookshop and buy ourselves something readable. I ended up getting Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (which I haven't read yet. If you want to beat me up for that, you'll have to come all the way over to Germany to do it, so nyah), whereas Huw got a Stephen Baxter/Arthur C. Clarke book. We're science fiction nerds. Deal with it.
Anyway, on from there we visited the Film Museum. It was incredibly cool; they had examples of photography from the 19th Century, those wheels that you turn to get an image through the holes, and various other optical tricks, such as 3D photos that were basically two photos taken a few centimetres apart from each other, and you could really get a perception of depth. They had some landscape shots that were really very impressive. One of the problems with photos is that it's hard to give an idea of depth, if these kinds of things became commonplace today (ie digital cameras with two lenses and software that supports their viewing) then I think we'd get a much better idea of how impressive the views actually are, or how big a room is, for example. While we were in the film museum, we watched a few silent Laurel and Hardy films they had showing. Slapstick was very impressive back when they had to use body language to make up for the lack of sound. As a side note, Huw and I could totally pull of Laurel and Hardy costumes. An idea for the next costume party, I do declare.
Optical Illusions B' We! It's supposed to be an elephant, apparently.
Afterwards, we went straight back to the youth hostel and started writing this entry, which has taken ages and I'm now sick of writing it. The end. See y'all later!