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My first
destination was Frankfurt, Germany. This part of the story
is pretty wordy and picture-less, since all I was really trying to
figure out at this point was where to go, and how to get from
the airport to the city. I had no time to think about
taking pictures... I was too busy quietly freaking out and trying to read foreign words.
If you would like to see a bunch of pretty pictures, you may
want to skip to the next stage of my journey! If you would
like to hear a tale of terror, read on. There are a few
pictures at the end.
It is rare that anything makes me
extremely nervous, but I experienced all kinds of spastic nerves
from the moment I walked through security at the Portland
airport. I waved goodbye to my parents and lumbered my
way to the gate with all of my gear on my back. My
backpack weighed a metric ton. Even while sitting in the
gate waiting for my plane to leave, my brain could not compute
that I was about to head out of the country to a place so far
away.
I did not have a straight flight from Portland, OR to
Germany. Nope, I had a layover in New York City's JFK
airport that was a lovely 5 hours long. During that time,
I enjoyed the second most expensive fast food cheeseburger of my
life (you'll find out about #1 later), and was rather rudely
informed by a Delta "team member" that the airport did NOT have WiFi access, thank you very much. I also learned to hate
airports.
At the gate, everybody was speaking German and
waving around little dark red passports. Before I had even
left the country, I suddenly started
to feel very foreign. I opted to sit by an emergency exit
on the plane to Germany, because I was one of the only solo
passengers on the flight whose first language was English.
It was fine, I guess, but it meant I couldn't take any pictures
out the window, because there wasn't one. That's not to
say that I would have taken pictures if I'd had the chance, but
who knows. I might have. It was also
unfortunate because I had absolutely nothing to look at or do
during the night. I attempted sleep, but I was too nervous
to really make that happen so instead I doodled in my notebook
in the dark and rummaged through my fanny pack.
An awful picture of my fanny pack. You'll see
more of this fashion faux pas later.
It had all of my
"important" stuff in it and I usually slept with it
on. What a geek.
The airplane ride
lasted 8 and a half dreadful hours. The man sitting next to me
was German, and he spoke some English. I think he could
sense my terror, because he gave me his business card and told me
to call him if I ever got into a tight spot. It was nice
of him, but the business card of a complete stranger on an
airplane is little comfort, especially when you can't even make
sense of how to read the phone number and don't have a phone.
Flying over the Atlantic Ocean, my brain still could not
grasp the concept that I was going to be so far away from my
home country.
My trip got off to
a very rocky start. My first stop was Frankfurt Germany,
and I had quite the adventure trying to get from the airport to
my hostel in the city.
After jumping off
the plane, I was instantly immersed in a shocking world of
foreign-ness. Foreign languages, foreign customs,
foreign signs... even the symbols for "bathroom" and "exit" are
different in Germany. I had to walk through customs, and I
wasn't even sure what it was when I went through it. A
sturdy man with gray hair and a scowl peered down at me from
behind the glass of a towering kiosk. Stammering, I
squeaked out "I... I don't know what I'm doing!" He
continued to scowl.
"Vell," he gruffed
in accented English, "I don't know vhat you arr doing, eitherr!"
"I, um, need to get
to the underground," I offered.
In a blunt gesture,
he threw down his hand, palm-up. I placed my passport in
it. He gave it a heavy stamp. "Velcome to Germany,"
he said, and then nodded for me to get out of the way.
The Frankfurt airport is exactly
like a giant installation level in some sort of post-apocalyptic
zombie video game. It's vast, gray, stark, uninviting,
windowless, and here and there the ceiling panels open to reveal
the guts of the building; large foiled pipes and wires dangling
here and there, disappearing into shadowy recesses that one
would definitely expect an abomination to jump out of at any
moment if the lights went out. I wish I had taken some
pictures of the inside of it, because it is really quite a
horror of a building.
Things went downhill even
further from there. After finally making my way to the
terminal where I could catch the subway into the city, I ran
into what, in retrospect, was probably the biggest snafu of the
entire trip. By the way, service people in the Frankfurt airport
speak fluent English. I asked "Sprechen sie Englisch?" to a few
information desk people, and they all nodded gravely and looked as though I'd just
asked them if they knew what an automobile was.
After getting some directions, I
walked down a long stairway into a stiflingly hot concrete
cave with rows of glowing subway ticket machines.
The "subway" in Germany is called the "S-Bahn"
in most cities, and I knew this, but what I didn't know is that
the ticket machines do not say "S-Bahn" on them anywhere.
There were two different types of machines in the cave, but I
had no idea which one to use. Every word written on the
things was entirely foreign and full of Zs, Ws, Ks, and vowels
with umlauts on them. I'll never know if it was really
that hot in the train cave, but I was wearing too many
layers and
I was quite flustered and sleep deprived, so I was sweating
like crazy as I pounded at random buttons trying to pick a
destination. Even after I switched the machines' language
to English, I was still thoroughly confused because all of the
buttons I had to push were in German.
Exasperated, I spied some payphones
in the corner of the cave and thought for a moment about calling
home. I knew I would probably break down and go on about
how awful the airport was, and that I couldn't figure out how to
work the ticket machines. For a moment, I had thoughts of
running right back out of the cave and buying a ticket back to
Portland.
No. No. What was
I thinking? I bit my lip and decided to stick it out,
instead. It was just a ticket machine, and I hadn't even
left the airport yet. I had to tough it out, or I would
never make it through the trip. A long line spiraled out
into the cave from a small row of ticket desks, and I decided to
wait in the line and talk to a person.
Sweat continued to pour down my
face as I stood in my old airport clothes and waited another
thirty minutes for the line to move. When I finally got to
the desk, I told the woman my destination and she gave me a tiny
little ticket. This is not THE ticket, but it looked
exactly like this:
The date is partially written in Roman numerals, the hours
are in 24-hour time, and all the words are in German.
Why was I confused again? This looks really simple!
Not.
Staring at the ticket made me feel
better about the fact that I opted out of using the silly ticket
machines.
With this roadblock behind me
finally, I crawled down some steps in the cave onto platform 8
(or whatever) and waited for the train. In retrospect, I
am very lucky I chanced to get on the train going the right
direction. I stepped on, and after about 15 minutes of
dreary urban scenery I emerged from the train into another
subway cave. I found an escalator that looked vaguely like
an exit, and stepped on. After about 15 seconds, felt cool
air brush my face.
I ascended into the Frankfurt main
train station. The air was marvelously crisp and full of
the muted echoes of hundreds of voices. Pigeons pecked
about the ground, an odd sight to see in a place that still
feels so overwhelmingly "indoors." The air held a strange
sort of haze, and I felt like I'd just taken an escalator from
hell into heaven.
And lo, there is a God.
Stage 2 - Frankfurt
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