A day in Frankfurt and my mission to find a

     Well, we arrived in Frankfurt with no problem. Kerry had printed out the map of the Frankfurt airport as we had both heard horror stories about it being hard to navigate.  We got our luggage straight away no problems, and do you know that my now svelte 51.5 lb suitcase STILL had a heavy tag on it!!! Obviously there is a picture of me and the monstrosity on a computer system that must pop up when I enter an airport cause that is just crazy!!!  And on a side note, if your worried about the price of gas for the planes and that is the reason that weight limits have gone down, doesn't it make more sense to allow a 70 lb bag on the plane than 2 bags at 50 lb????  If the ploy is that 1 person is not going to pack 2 50 lb bags they have obviously not ever met me :)   Anyway, we had to find our way to the Treffpunkt or meeting place which once we got our bags was the next logical thing to worry about.

We walked about 30 steps and lo and behold in big letters TREFFPUNKT! It doesn't get much sweeter than that. We hung out there for about 15 minutes or so talking to some folks from Connecticut who were giving me the low down on Mystic, CT since that has been a place I wanted to go ever since I saw the movie with Julia Roberts.  Not long after that Maria came to pick us up and take us to the hotel.

     We really weren't sure what to expect for sure with the hotels; Kerry had researched them all and we knew which did have air conditions and which didn't but we reallly weren't concerned becaue the average temp for that time of year was to be in the 60's and 70's.  Of course, that would be the average temp not the temp for 2007 which was in the mid to high 80's, yuck.

We got to the Holiday Inn Frankfurt City and it was a huge hotel and since it was only 1130am or so we were pleasantly surprised that we were able to check in. We hauled everything up to the room and discovered we had a balcony and of course made straight for it. While we were on the balcony we realized that we had a pair of Pigeons that lived in the balcony above us and didn't seem to be bothered by us at all. We knew we couldn't hang out in the room for any lenght of time or we would be tempted to sleep so we decided we'd go and have a look around. There was a festival going on in Frankfurt that weekend and there were some really odd but cool things all around. At one point we saw a rope tied from one building to the next and a guy was bicycling across it. On another corner we saw a bunch of people bungee jumping off of a crane, crazy stuff. I had wanted to find the Frankfurt Zoo but that didn't happen because a crisis hit.

     Now let me clarify a crisis for me not Kerry, she now has a perm so she doesn't have to worry about making her hair look presentable, it just does. I on the other hand have naturally frizzy hair, not naturally curly or naturally straight, naturally frizzy.  So I'm looking around the room and notice the plug and it is totally not the kind of plug that they use in the UK. It had never occurred to me to check the plug adapters in Europe because I had the stuff I had bought in Ireland when I blew up my hair dryer the second day of that vacation.

  I had just assumed that they would have the same plugs, well, you know that old saying never assume it makes an ass out of u and me, yep that was me. Well, now the realization hits that I'm going to have an afro the whole time I'm here because I have nothing to tame my tresses with. Nothing against folks with afro's they look good on some people but I tend to look like little orphan Annie. I drug Kerry downstairs to the front desk to ask where I could get some kind of curling iron (which evidently mean crimpers in Germany because no one knew what a curling iron was, lol); the guy originally said that most stores would be closed today as it was a Sunday but then he remembered that it was a festival weekend and he said that the stores in the city center would be open by 1 or 2pm. He gave us directions to the bus stop and told us where to get off, which of course we promptly forgot, lol.

     Now public transport is not one of my strong points, I have a hard time understanding the bus system in Pittsburgh let alone in Germany. Hell, who am I kidding, I can't remember when you hail a taxi if it's free when the light is on or off. Well, we stood at the bus stop as one bus came picked up, dropped off and left. Not really sure what we were waiting for because that was the correct bus but we didn't get on and that ended up being a good thing because we met the first 2 people that we would see occaisionally over the next 2 weeks Liam and Sylvia from Vancover, Canada. They were going to the same place and must have noticed our perplexed looks because Liam came right up to us and started talking and we ended up spending the rest of the day with them.

Also, if it wasn't for Liam I wouldn't have found my universal converter able to convert my UK hair styling tools into any plug form in 150 countires, thanks Liam!! Anyway, we wondered around the city center for several hours and then it started to rain and we started to get really tired so we caught the bus back to the hotel. I might add we caught the CORRECT bus back to the hotel all by ourselves because we had lost Liam and Sylvia in a store.

     Once back at the hotel we decided we were hungry all the sudden and got some dinner and struggled to stay awake until 8pm which for whatever reason seemed to be an appropriate time to go to sleep. At 8pm sharp we went to sleep and by 11pm we we're both wide awake????? Now how  does that happen you're awake for 32-33 hours straight, you get so bloody tired and bam 2 hours later you're wide awake.

Well, for whatever reason it turned out to be a good thing because there were fireworks in Frankfurt that night and we had a great view from our really super cool balcony.  At midnight, I started to get tired again and headed back to bed, I think Kerry had stayed awake for a while but I was out like a light.  Out like a light that is until I was awakened to wings flapping and Pigeon calls; we had gone to bed with the balcony door open cause it was warm in the room but needless to say I had to close the balcony door once I realized that our neighborly Pigeons might want to nap on our balcony or in our suitcases, lol.