Frankfurt, Germany

If Frankfurt were an animal, it would be a stick insect. It’s largely inanimate, contains little to make it stand out, and doesn’t hold your attention for too long. Its train station, those temples of the post-war Germany where everyone goes for pretzels and coffee on a Sunday, was impressive, with its soaring latticed arch and purring Inter-City Express (ICE) trains itching to head off to more interesting climes. But unfortunately stepping outside the station it was all downhill from there. The station opened out into the grotty Bahnhofsviertel, the streets of which were littered with unthreatening but unpleasant drunks and hard drug users. Walking eastwards and taking care to step over the used syringes, the quality of people improved only very slightly as I entered the banking district. Luckily, it was largely devoid of suits seeing as it was the weekend, so I managed to get some clear snaps of the Euro sign and its modest selection of skyscrapers.

I continued on my morning amble from through the shopping district, through the familiar spaces of Konstablerwache and Hauptwache before looping back south towards the river and my YHA hostel. The dull familiarity of Frankfurt made it a prime location to hang for another day to lock myself inside the hostel and do a full day of work.

I was glad to see my dormmates had cleared out for the day. There was one in particular who I had been wary of. Called Vikram, he was a seemingly friendly chap from India here on a business trip, but despite his cheeriness I got the distinct first impression he was not someone to be trusted any further than he could be pushed. This was borne out when I revealed I could understand German, as he asked my help to pen a letter to a German business partner which was quite an effort, seeing as his English was not good and my German was a lot worse.

Between us we penned something along the lines of the sentiment he wanted to portray, which was an apology to his business partner for losing their trust. Apparently his story was he had paid a stack of Euros in cash in a business deal but the Indian bank he’d got the notes from had cheated him by putting some (very old) Deutschmark notes in amongst them, which are useless (and have been for about eight years). His business contact was understandably rather miffed about this, and so this was Vikram’s apology, which he seemed intent on ending with the German for “I love you”, which despite my protestations that it wasn’t a commonly-used phrase to end a business communication with, he seemed intent on including. Bizarre indeed.