Making Music in Frankfurt

21 December 2009

Making Music in Frankfurt

Monday morning, still in Nürnberg, we slept in a bit and had a leisurely morning. The view outside of our hotel room window was of the train station and the old city. The sun had still not risen and brightened the sky yet at 0730, but the city was bustling. Hoards of people were getting on and off of buses and trolleys, filing in and out of the train station; the Germans were back to work, clearly not slowed down from all of the glühwein drinking the night before.

Anna and I stopped at a café for a quick breakfast. I, again, had trouble deciding which delectable looking pastry or bread item I would try this morning. I settled on a croissant filled with nutella, and Anna had a wheat bagel with chive cream cheese and arugula…we ended up sharing both. We only had a few hours left in Nürnberg before we would board the 1200 train back to Frankfurt. We focused on the last few shopping items we needed like boxes of lebkuchen, decorative gingerbread hearts, more hot apfelstrudel, and a few other souvenirs.

There were additional stalls on the streets around the main platz. They were selling fresh fruits, veggies, cheese, spices, teas, meats and other food items. It was lovely to still have a market even in the dead of winter. The crowd at the market had also changed today. It was overrun with groups of schoolchildren. My guess was that they had bused them in from nearby towns, as a field trip, to see the market and shop for their families. After drinking our last Heidelbeer, hands full of heavy bags, we headed back to the hotel and ultimately for the train back to Frankfurt.

We felt like old pros when we arrived back in Frankfurt around 1400 and navigated to back to Hotel Adler effortlessly. After unloading, we started to make our way to the Römerberg, the old city, to visit the Frankfurt Weihnachtsmarkt. We walked through a very corporate area in the way with lots of skyscrapers, perhaps part of the Frankfurt financial district; Frankfurt is the finance capital of Germany. Next we came up on the Opera House and this opened up to a promenade lined with shops and restaurants. Anna and I re-consulted the map to verify the route to the aldstadt, and then continued on. Frankfurt had a bustling big city feel. It was not as quaintly European as the other places we’d visited. The stores were mainstream global companies like Diesel, Benetton, The Body Shop.

Another ten minutes later we came to a large square with a busy subway stop and a mall and high rise buildings all around. Looking at the map again, we realized we had walked completely in the opposite direction! It was very confusing to navigate this city. The streets were not laid out in a grid system and in this shopping area, everything looked the same. I was feeling quite hypoglycemic at this point, and suggested we stop for a quick lunch. We found a deli-style café which had all kinds of cured meats, salads, soups and so on. I got a delicious sandwich with chive cream cheese and lox on pretzel bread. We tried some lebkuchen mouse…it seems that at this time of year, you can find pretty much anything with the gingerbread or glühwein flavor.

Now with some food to fuel our brains, we were able to use our internal compass to guide us back in the direction of the aldstadt. When we found a street called Kornmarkt, we knew we were on the right track. This brought us to Römerberg; we found that all of the plazas in the old town were jam-packed with Weihnachtsmartkts. First order of business: taste the Frankfurt glühwein, then find something sugary to eat. I smelled chocolate and turned around to see a stall making chocolate covered popcorn. The odor was too good to resist so I bought a bag, and immediately became addicted. It is one of those snacks you simply can not stop eating one you start. Anna had to physically remove the bag from my hands…what else are friends for? Nearly five minutes later, I found a stall selling these miniature waffeln. The waffles were about the size of a quarter and some had kirsche (cherries) inside. I opted for the plain type with a light sprinkling of puderzucker on top. They were awesome!

As we continued to walk through the very crowded Frankfurt weihnachtsmarkt, Anna asked me if I would like another mug of glühwein. I said, “Anna, my stomach hurts. I think I am done with glühwein and sweets.” Anna stopped dead in her tracks and said, “Wait! What did you just say? I need to record this!” Finally, after eating my way through Germany, living on sugar and sausage, I had made myself feel sick. The bratwurst and potato pancakes no longer made my mouth water.

The focus shifted from food to shopping and site-seeing. I picked up a few more Christmas gifts, still determined to fill that duffle bag for my dad. The market seemed a lot more overwhelming than even the huge Nürnberg market-must be the city mentality that made people so much pushier and more aggressive. Or perhaps they had stronger glühwein here? We stepped inside a small cathedral for a respite from the crowds and listened to some organ music while we re-vascularized our fingers and toes. We took a stroll across one of the bridges spanning the River Main. This gave us a good view of the Frankfurt skyline and the bright weihnachtsmarkts below. Frankfurt has a very modern skyline for a European city. As we took pictures, we were repeatedly harassed by a man playing an accordion and trying to get money from us.

It had started to snow again and we were getting cold. Today is the winter solstice, and officially the shortest day of the year—not much sunlight today to warm the body. We ducked into the large Frankfurter Dom, a structure that had been looming over us all day as we meandered through Römerberg. The cathedral was very simple inside and seemed quite modern for Europe. Anna and I started to wonder if perhaps the church had been rebuilt after WWII bombings, as many structures in Germany had. Our travel guide actually told us that this was the original Gothic building. The main tower had been started in the 15th century but finished in the 1800s. The best part about the church was the vent on the floor spewing out hot air. I stood over that for quite some time!!

Anna and I both felt we had had enough of the Weihnachtsmarkt for now, as unbelievable as that was! We headed back towards the hotel with plans to find a restaurant on the way. A large and very busy buchhandlung, or bookstore, caught our eye as we made our way down the promenade. It was four stories, open in the middle with bright red leather couches for reading, and a great selection of books. I do not think I have ever seen a bookstore as crowded as this in my life…it was either the rush for last minute Christmas gifts, or the Germans just really like reading books.

Anna and I ended up in pregnancy book section. We both got a kick out flipping through these books. The first one we looked at was rather racy. There were a pair of naked breasts on every other page. Now of course it is important for an expectant mother to understand the changes her body will go through in pregnancy, but there were more breast pictures than were necessary. Now don’t misunderstand me…I have no problem with nudity, in fact I think we are far too prude regarding nudity in the US, but that’s another discussion for another time. It really was interesting to see how the German’s approached the subject of pregnancy: with topless women and instructions on the best sex positions during pregnancy. Anna said that even Scandinavia would be more conservative in these matters! My favorite thing of all was learning all of the German vocabulary pertaining to pregnancy. If I were an arzt, or doctor, in Germany, I would be a specialist in: Schwangerschaft, Geburt und Wochenbettn (translation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Puerperium); also known as a Geburtshelferin & Frauenheilkundler (OB/GYN). I’m sorry, but the German terms sound so much cooler than the English ones! Breast milk is brustmilch or muttermilch. Placenta is mutterkuchen (which I believe would literally translate to ‘mother cookie’). Umbilical cord is nabelschnur. Amniotic fluid is fruchtwasser (literal translation of ‘fruit water’). Meconium is kindspech. A uterus is a gebärmutter, and a cervix a gebärmutterhals. I think it would be awesome if expectant woman in the US would refer to themselves as “schwanger” instead of pregnant!

A few blocks away, Anna and I found a simple German pub at which to eat dinner. It was nice to have a break from the greasy Christmas market food. The server recommended some of the local beers to us. Germany has some 5,000 different beers so it is very regionalized. Way back in Bavaria in 1516, a beer purity law was passed called Reinheitsgebot. It dictated that breweries were only allowed to use four ingredients when making beer: yeast, hops, malt and water. This law actually stayed in effect until 1987 when the EU said it decreased competitiveness, but a great deal of the breweries still stand by this rule of purity. For dinner, Anna and I shared a weiner schnitzel (had to try this at least once in Germany!) and a cheese dish that is special to the Frankfurt area. It’s called “Handkåse mit musik” which translates to “Hand Cheese with Music.” You are probably wondering what music could have to do with cheese? Is the cheese served by a little man in lederhosen playing an accordion? Maybe an “oom-pa-pa” band playing instruments made out of cheese? I will just quote my Lonely Planet travel guide because they explained the cheese best, “…a name you could only hear in Germany. It describes a round cheese marinated in oil and vinegar with onions, served with bread and butter and no fork. As you might imagine, this potent mixture tends to give one a healthy dose of wind—the release of which, ladies and gentleman, is the ‘music’ part.” If I take nothing else from my experience in Germany, I will at least have a few new and awesome words and phrases in my vocabulary. As we settle into our hotel room tonight, I think Anna is in the toiletten making music, and I am looking up any women’s health related word I can think of on an English-German dictionary. Another wunderbar night in Germany! Gut nacht!!