This month -- and my travels -- are drawing to a close. I have arrived in Frankfurt am Main and am flying back to New York tomorrow. You could be forgiven for thinking for a second that the picture above is of New York City; it makes it pretty apparent why wags call Frankfurt "Mainhattan".
I am staying at the Hotel Frankfurter Hof. Of its many amenities, the most important one for me is the elevator: yesterday's rustic lodgings in Würzburg came with four flights of steep stairs to contend with, not a good thing when you're loaded down with anvil luggage (luckily, the proprietress let me stow the heaviest suitcase in a closet under the stairs). By the way, the picture above makes the hotel look more alluring than it really is -- it fronts right onto a very busy, almost honky-tonk intersection, you have to enter through a small side entrance, and it's surrounded on all sides by some rather ugly buildings.
I had forgotten how less-than-attractive much of Frankfurt is. The area around the train station is, if anything, even *seedier* than I remembered, and many of the streets, even in the center, are devoid of charm. I therefore made a bee-line for Sachsenhausen, a much more gemütlich (cozy) area on the south bank of the Main River. There I visited the Städelmuseum, with its huge collection including works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Monet, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso, and also the intriguing Deutsches Filmmuseum, with its extensive collection of historical filmmaking equipment and display/projection devices, a number of which you can turn on and "watch".
Still fighting a cold, I was in the mood for something that would be a bit of a tonic for dinner. I walked past the many Ebbelwoi (apple wine) taverns that Sachsenhausen is known for, and stopped in front of a small, stand-up Thai place on a corner. It was crowded and smelled wonderful; the "kitchen" was a stove right behind the counter where the cook was making each dish to order and serving it up hot from the wok. I had a red chicken curry, deliciously fresh and aromatic, that did wonders for my stuffy head, before heading back to the hotel for my last night here.
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And so this journal comes to an end. Looking back, what surprises me the most is how much I prefer the eastern parts of Germany to the more familiar ones in the west. If I had to rank the major cities I visited, I would put Dresden, Leipzig and Erfurt at the top, Nuremberg and Würzburg in the middle, and Frankfurt, well... This may have a lot to do with the hastier rebuilding of the western cities, and the fact that many of the eastern cities remained essentially frozen in time during the DDR years. Even now, Dresden's painstakingly rebuilt monuments look better than some of the replicas in western cities, and its shiny, state-of-the-art streetcars put Nuremberg's and Frankfurt's dirty, crowded subways to shame. There is also a more relaxed pace of life in the eastern Länder that I find more appealing. I have enjoyed sharing my travels via this website. This month has been a fascinating and enlightening experience for me. For now, though ... back to New York!
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