Frankfurt

Frankfurt Main Haufbahnhoff, originally uploaded by DPC Tutt.

Today is Sunday which means a day off here at the klinik. Besides one infusion (which I have yet to receive) I had no treatments scheduled for today. Instead of hanging out around the town here we decided to hop the train to Frankfurt and see what was going on. It turned out we picked a great day to go.

Right now in Germany it's Karnival time. I'm not sure what the celebration is all about but it's definitely a celebration. People dress up and drink and there are parades in all the towns. In this region people yell out "Hellau!" all the time during Karnival as a celebratory greeting.

We left Bad Salzhausen on the train, made a transfer in Friedburg and arrived at the Main train station in Frankfurt exactly one hour after our departure. Once we arrived at Frankfurt Main Hbf we were amazed. This is the largest train station in Germany (and maybe Europe?) serving 300,000 people daily. It's huge and awesome and clean and well organized with 24 separate platforms.

Once we arrived we got a coffee and a muffin and started our walk. The weather was cool and windy but manageable with a toque and gloves. We headed through the park (avoiding the red light district) and went to the Main tower. 3.50€ each got us a ride up the high speed elevator to the viewing platform at the absolute top of the building. From there we could see all of the city and the rest of our walking route for the day.

We left the Main tower and headed east. All of the shops and businesses seemed to be closed but we found a vendor on the street selling wieners and beer so we sat down for lunch. We both tried the curryworst with beer and hot wine. It was devine and seemed to satisfy our stomachs for the moment. As we sat there more and more people came to the street and pretty soon it was packed with partygoers dresed up in full regalia to celebrate the Karnival.

As we kept walking more and more people came out of the woodwork to the point that some street were packed with partygoers. We soon came to the realization that today was parade day. We finished our walk over the Main river and came back on a different bridge right to the start of the parade. We walked "upstream" against the flow of the parade and were able to take the whole thing in (it was massive!) in about 45 minutes.

There is one huge difference between parades in Canada and parades in Germany. In Canada we throw candy, sometimes. In Germany they throw candy AND give out beer form the floats. It's great. And on top of that everyone in the parade is drinking too. We saw one marching band whose bass drum player had a beer holder on top of his drum! We didn't stick around to see the aftermath of the parade but I can imagine more than a few partcipants and observers may have a hard time making it to work tomorrow morning.

After our parade watching we headed back to the train station and caught the train back here to Bad Salzhausen. It was good day. It was especially good to get out of this little town and see something new.