The Last Day of Our First Trip: A Little More Frankfurt

We essentially started off the day with a walk to the historical center of the city (Altstadt). We wandered around there for a few minutes before making our way over to the iron foot bridge (Eiserner Steg). We really enjoyed our stroll across the bridge, and the view of the city from there is great. 

Old Town district of Frankfurt

A view of Frankfurt from the foot bridge. The padlocks that line the bridge are left by couples and have initials written or engraved on them. Throwing away the padlock key is meant to symbolize everlasting love. Apparently this is done at structures around the world, though it's the first time we noticed it.

When we arrived at the far end of the bridge there were some policemen blocking the exit. A movie or TV show was being filmed on the street below, and they were trying to keep pedestrians and bicyclists from interrupting the shot. Considering we don’t understand a word of German, we had no way to know how long we were going to have to wait there. Some locals were just pushing their way through and others, frustrated, made their way back across the bridge to find a new plan for crossing the river. We ended up waiting about 15 minutes. It rained on and off throughout the day but not enough for us to mind hanging out on the bridge and looking at the skyline. We watched some of the filming while we waited, too. It was a chase scene with police cars and policemen chasing the “bad guys,” so it was kind of fun to watch the cars come screeching down the street over and over as they filmed multiple takes. I don’t think we would have been amused by this for more than 15 minutes though, so the timing was perfect. 

After being allowed to pass, we wandered up along the river before crossing over to the district of Sachsenhausen. We knew a section of this area was well-known for many bars and restaurants. We wandered all over the neighborhood, which was really cute, but never ran into a bar. I think we expected that even if we could not find the exact streets we were looking for that we would run into a random bar once or twice. We did not. Once we started consulting the map a little more closely, we did make our way to the precise section of the district where the bars live. It is an older part of the city with cobblestone streets and many bars, most of them unopened yet for the day. It was clear this area is most popular late at night as there were shot special advertisements lining the streets. We did go into one of the open bars. We shared some potato pancakes and each had a beer (we are such partiers).

Some of the bars in the Sachsenhausen neighborhood

We left there and wandered back across the bridge. At this point, it was late afternoon/early evening, and we were starting to get a little worried about the flights home the following day. Hurricane Sandy caused cancellations for three days from most European cities to the New York area so we didn’t think it would be possible for us to get all the way home as planned the next day. We wandered back to Starbucks for the trusty Wi-Fi. We ended up sitting there for two hours coming up with a few different plans. We eventually decided to just try the direct flight from Frankfurt to Chicago, which meant leaving the hotel the next morning by 4:45-5am (not fun in any country). We decided to get take-out Thai food for dinner and ate in our hotel room while we packed. 

A great view of the skyline and the footbridge at the end of a fun day in Frankfurt.

  

The process of getting to the airport was relatively easy. We took the metro system back to the main train station and then to the airport. Luckily we planned to give ourselves two hours prior to departure at the airport as it was needed. We got to the gate with just a few minutes to spare before they called our name and gave us boarding passes (yay!)… We were then pulled to another room for additional screening and watched security agents open every zipper, go through every shoe, every makeup item, etc. Better them than us, though,  as I am pretty confident our bags smelled like we’d been wearing the same clothes for 10 days (we had). We were nervous that the flight was going to go without us, but we made it. We even had a whole row of seats to ourselves for the flight home.

Our “first” trip was a lot of fun. Germany was great for many reasons, but a trip to Prague and the Czech Republic is a must-do!