Auf wiedersehen Frankfurt
We found ourselves referring to returning from Barcelona to Frankfurt as “coming home”! I guess we’ve been here long enough, huh?
The flight “home” on Iberia wasn’t any more comfortable than the one going. Not our favorite airline. We did save $250 per person versus flying Lufthansa, but they’d need to offer at least that much of a price differential again before we’d think about being repeat customers.
It took the cab from the airport about twice as long to get us back to our apartment Monday night because streets in the middle of the city were blocked by a very large student protest. (Not our students, students from public institution, the University of Frankfurt.) We never did determine the cause. The cab driver said it was because the school closed the subsidized cafeteria; one of my students said it was because their fees were raised.
Tuesday was my last class; it ended with the students doing an in-class project in lieu of an exam as an element of their final grade so I didn’t really get a chance to say a proper “good-bye.” I wish I’d had about two more sessions with them. Seven was too few. In fact, three more would have been the equivalent of a semester. No wonder it felt a bit unfinished. They seem to have gotten a lot out of it, though, according to what they’ve said to me and what I’ve heard that they said to others. Good. It was a good experience for me, too. (Not that I’m exactly done. I still have three dozen ads and IMC plans to read and grade!)
Wednesday night we were taken by a young German couple (actually, she’s American, married to a German guy) to their favorite apfelwein stube across the river in Sachsenhausen. What fun! Apfelwein (also called Ebbelwoi) is a drink peculiar to Frankfurt. It’s sort of like hard cider, I guess. It’s served in blue pottery pitchers called Bembels. The place is warm and cozy and at least as friendly as a pub. It was packed; you share long tables with strangers. Groups of friends were drinking and singing. The food was wurst und kase und sauerkraut, huge servings filling the plates. Great fun!
Thursday night we went to the Jazzkeller, the oldest jazz club in Frankfurt. It’s also the only one that survived WWII, because it’s a grotto deep underground. (Maybe it was originally built as some sort of a storage vault.) Small and intimate, it calls itself Frankfurt’s Village Vanguard and a lot of the same people who played there also played here over the years – Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan, Lionel Hampton, Dizzy Gillespie – it’s a long and impressive list. The act last night was a piano, bass and guitar jazz trio, excellent musicians. In fact, all three teach music at the university in Würzburg. They introduced their songs in German, of course, but I could make out the sense of a lot of it. Besides the familiar jazz standards, they played a few up-beat treatments of Christmas carols, including one they said hardly anyone in Germany knew. To their surprise, Sylv and I sang along – it was Mel Torme’s “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…”! Nice evening. One thing we especially appreciated: Nicht Rauchen (No Smoking). We had been fearing a smoky little dive and expected to come home smelling like the bottom of an ashtray. Happily, though, smoking is not allowed in public places in Germany.
Friday we thought we’d better start hitting the museums before we run out of time. Most of them are within walking distance of the apartment, along the river just across the bridge in Sachsenhausen. We’ve been lucky with the weather. We actually brought snow boots, expecting to need them here in December, but it’s been quite mild. Until Friday, that is, when the temperature dropped to 5ºC. It felt even colder walking along the river.
We managed to do two of them in one day. The Museum Weltkulturen was a confusingly laid out, maximally eclectic mélange of stuff ranging from ancient Iranian pottery through the marquetry of André Charles Boulle to modern Japanese packaging design award winners. After lunch at a nearby bier stube, we hit the Deutsches Architekturmuseum. Their exhibits were mostly interesting, including everything from a whole floor of very well done dioramas tracing the development of housing design over time, to drawings, photos and models of contemporary German commercial and residential architecture. We saved the Stadel-Museum with its world-class art collection for a day on its own – Saturday, perhaps.
Lunch included a strange item we hadn’t tried before. We had a Sachsenhausen plate for two that included the usual piles of potatoes and sauerkraut (my own sauerkraut preparation recipe is actually better than theirs in this place) plus a pork chop (which is more like a ham steak in our lexicon), a rindfleischwurst (basically a Hebrew National beef hot dog) and something described on the menu as “meat loaf” with a fried egg on it. What the latter turned out to be was something very much like Spam, only better! It was the best thing on the plate.
We did get to the Stadel-Museum on Saturday, but on the way we stumbled into a big flea market extending for blocks down the museum side of the river. As we were walking along on our side we kept seeing people coming the other way carrying stuff like chairs and lamps and whatnot. They seemed to coming over a raised bridge we’d never crossed, so up and over we went. Halfway across we could see tents and tarps along the riverbank, in the direction we were headed anyway. People were teeming across the bridge in both directions. It was a nice Saturday early afternoon and contrary to the weather predictions, it wasn’t face-freezingly cold. At the end of the bridge a bunch of Middle Eastern-looking guys in Santa hats were playing Dixieland jazz! They were delighted that Sylv and I were singing along to one of their tunes, “When the saints come marching in…” They were doubly delighted when I contributed some change to the collection in the Santa hat they’d placed on the pavement in front of them. Hey, it’s Christmas and they had a good act!
The market stall operators were beginning to pack up, not that there was anything we really wanted to buy. It’s a shame, though, that we didn’t discover it until the last weekend we’re here. We love flea markets.
There was a long line to buy tickets to get into the museum (10 Euros apiece for old folks – $30 total), possibly because they had a large exhibition of Botticelli works. (I thought his drawings were exquisite, but I didn’t care much for his paintings. Odd, that.) Something nice all the museums we’ve been in Germany seem to do: they store your coats and backpacks and even purses in a secure area (garderobe) for you, free (kostenfrei).
It took hours to go through the museum, as we’d expected it would. They’ve got an extensive collection of work by all the Italian and Dutch old masters and some of the French impressionists, a representative selection of contemporary work by every charlatan you’ve ever heard of (sorry, most modern art strikes me as a giant fraud perpetrated on gullible people with more money than sense), and a particularly comprehensive catalog of German artists from Medieval times to last week. Sylv and I wandered through at different paces, but when we met at the end and compared notes, we both had the same favorite: a painting by Vermeer of a geographer in his study. If you’d like to have a look, here’s a link: http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/vermeer/geographer.html
It’s compelling to see how Vermeer manages light. Everyone’s seen his “The Milkmaid”; this is a similar treatment. (Sylv thinks it’s the same window!) There are many details in the original painting that you can’t see in the thumbnail, of course, such as tiny glints of light in a couple of the window panes, perhaps reflecting flaws in the glass.
It was cold and dark by the time we finished. (There are 34 museums listed in Frankfurt; I’m afraid the other 90% will have to wait ’til we come back someday, if we’re invited back.) We sore-footedly walked across another bridge (cities on rivers are especially beautiful, I think, especially at night, and Frankfurt seems especially so) in hopes of catching a cab on “our side.” No such luck. Maybe you can’t hail cabs in the street in Frankfurt; maybe you have to have someone call one for you as we do in the apartment. If I’d been smart, I’d turned left instead of right when we crossed the bridge and headed for the Intercontinental Hotel, which was not too far away. There would surely have been a cabstand there. As it was, we had to trudge the couple of miles home, partly on cobblestone streets. We cut through the Weihnachten Markt on the way. It was packed tight with wall-to-wall revelers, as usual. The streets are wet with hot wine and oh, the glorious smells wafting out of the various food stands! We’re eating in tonight, though – we have a lot of groceries in the fridge and cupboards to consume in the next three days.
It’s Sunday morning and despite the cold, we opened the apartment windows to listen to the cacophony of bells tolling from the many churches in Frankfurt (for the last time, it occurs to us, a bit sadly).
Our constant companion Klassic Radio has been playing carols, of course, but they just added something new: a reading in German of Clement Moore’s “‘Twas the night before Christmas…”, still in perfect rhythm and rhyme. The performer is a rich baritone; he has a very fatherly-sounding voice. It’s fun to pick out the words we know in German. Here’s a link to the text:
http://www.christmasmagazine.com/de/spirit/poemNI.asp?ID=199&sort=title
Sunday afternoon we were invited for coffee and cake at the home of one of the Frankfurt School officials, a woman who’s been wonderful to us through our whole stay. Super coffee (as strong as my mother’s legendary “coffee with hair on it”!) and a masterpiece of a cake she’d created. Wow! It was a lovely afternoon. It’s special to be invited to someone’s home and we really appreciated her thoughtfulness.
Monday evening we were treated to a Chinese hot pot dinner (huo guo) near the Hauptbahnhof by two of my students (liang ge wo de xuesheng) from China (Zhongguoren). It made a nice change and I got to practice my Hanyu!
And of course it’s a great tribute to me that students want to spend time outside of class with us. I wish we’d have been able to do more of that with the students in Frankfurt the way we used to do in Macedonia, where we were able to treat a half dozen students to a pizza lunch each day at the school’s expense. They’re such interesting people! Can you imagine learning Chinese so well that you could go to a university in China and take a course as complicated as marketing? They’ve doubled that – they’ve learned both English and German well enough to study in both languages. What a challenge and what an accomplishment.
The area around the train station in Frankfurt (which we had to go through to get to the restaurant) is dreadfully seedy. There are several blocks of sex shops, girlie bars and goodness knows what else. I didn’t want to look too closely. It would be embarrassing to walk along those streets alone, much less with my wife and two students. The offers from the hawkers are quite explicit. It’s more openly raw than anywhere I’ve been before. Even Amsterdam is relatively discreet. I remember seeing some sex shops in Berlin from the tour bus, but they seemed a little more upscale and there was nowhere near this much of a concentration.
We saved up a wish for our “Last Supper” on Tuesday evening. My father’s favorite meal when I was growing up was sauerbraten, beef marinated in spices then slow-cooked until it’s fork-tender. My grandmother made it the traditional way. She put the meat in a special pot and added the spices (and red wine, I think) and set the pot out on an unheated porch for a few days until she deemed it was ready. (We used to say until the meat knocked on the lid of the pot and said, “Ich bin ready!”) While the meat was cooking she would make kartoffelklassen (potato dumplings) and red cabbage. Needless to say, sauerbraten didn’t happen all that often. After grandma was gone, my mother would cook it occasionally. Even Sylv learned how to do it; in fact she made it one time when my parents were visiting and my mother looked daggers at her for showing her up! Anyhow, sauerbraten has a special place in the life of the Lauterborns.
When Christian (the German former student from Hawaii who brought me to the attention of the school here in the first place and who’s been such a help to us the whole trip) asked what we’d like to eat on our last night, I said, “Sauerbraten!” He tracked down a nearby restaurant that had it on their menu and guided us there. The restaurant turned out to be a totally charming place we’d walked by three or four times on our way to the Romerplatz but never found open. There has been a restaurant called Das Storch (the stork) on this site for more than 700 years. (It had to be rebuilt after WWII, of course, but it was faithfully reproduced as it had looked before according to old pictures and drawings.) We got there at about 6:30, but they told us to come back in an hour, for two reasons. One, the sauerbraten was still cooking and wouldn’t be ready ’til then and two, they couldn’t seat us ’til then anyway; the place was totally booked.
Keine problem. We wandered a couple of blocks over for a last look at the Weihnachten Markt and had a mug of hot mulled apfelwein to ward off the chill and prime our appetites. The square was wall-to-wall joyous people of course, as it has been every night we’ve been there. It’s hard to describe what it’s like; imagine a big state fair, maybe, with a Christmas theme. Elaborately constructed, brightly decorated wooden booths are selling all sorts of Christmas merchandise, most of which seems handmade. There’s also plenty of food and wine and beer on offer and everybody seems to have a potato pancake or some sort of a wurst or baked goodie in one hand and a glass or mug of something in the other. Adding to the charm are the churches and half-timbered buildings you can see surrounding the square above the Christmas lights strung everywhere. What fun.
Finally it was time to return to our cozy restaurant and eat one of the most delicious meals of my life. The sauerbraten was perfect as were the kartoffelklossen and the red cabbage; everything looked and tasted exactly as I’d imagined it would. I washed it down with a couple of glasses of a special Christmas beer, a dark bock-ish brew that went perfectly with the food. Sylv had a couple of glasses of a German rotwein, also a perfect match. I don’t remember what the grape was, a multi-syllabic word starting with “D.” I’ll have to look it up and see if we can find it anywhere when we get home. What a beautiful way to end our stay.
Our last stroll through the cobblestone streets to our apartment, our last view of beautiful “Mainhattan” from our apartment window; we’re suddenly conscious that we’re doing everything for the last time, at least for this trip.
When we took off for home Wednesday morning, it was exactly 0ºC and great big snowflakes were floating down. We may indeed be leaving just in time.
Auf wiedersehn, Frankfurt. Thanks for a lovely month. See you again sometime, we hope.