Frankfurt

I have to say we are three for three on hotels this trip. The Concorde Hotel in Frankfurt turns out to be a four-star designer extravaganza, all dark wood and white cloth. The furniture in the lobby all has names, and there’s a bowl of granny smith apples next to the bowl of Werther’s. In the room, you can choose among four colours of lights available at the base of the white drapes. The ceiling is easily twelve feet high, and the leather couch has a matching leather coffee table with a wooden panel. There’s also a matching leather footstool. On the down side, we are about three blocks away from the hotel where I last stayed in Frankfurt, which is just a short walk from the train station. It also means we are about two blocks away from the red light district. I walked today past a neon sign that actually said “girls, girls, girls.”

Crazy Ass Trees
Along the Main river, there’s some kind of public park that has clearly been given over to exotic plants, including all kinds of wonderful trees. There are yew trees and oak trees and the ones I disbelievingly painted in paint-by-number pictures as a child, that seem themselves to have been painted by numbers up their trunks. There is a monkey paw that I’ve only ever seen before in Victoria, some kind of symmetric giant that has two parallel trunks, and a whole corridor of these things that look like nothing on earth, with no foliage at this time of year, but some kind of bulbous growths at the ends of large twisted branches. They all stop at exactly the same height.

Derelicts
Frankfurt seems to have more people living rough than I’ve seen in most European cities. Around the main shopping centre they are lying on the ground in groups, or sitting together on the benches, or lurching from place to place, talking to themselves about their troubles. In the grocery store on the corner there was a man running from place to place, brushing people aside as he collected his packages of pistachios and raced to the cashier. Up closer than we wanted to be to him in the checkout line, we could see he was quite young, in his early thirties maybe, although he looked at first glance twenty years older than that. His skin was covered in sores. He seemed to be on companionable terms with the skinny man with green hair who was waiting by the door. He was having his own problems, and appeared unclear about whether he had actually bought a chocolate bar or not, and if he had, whether or not it could be opened.

Pork Knuckles
Before we came to Frankfurt, our colleagues suggested that we sample the local cuisine, so we made an effort to find it, dining tonight to one side of a medieval square. One of the signature items is a very large roasted chunk of pork, served on a bed of sauerkraut with mustard on the side. It was actually quite delicious, once you got over the emotional realization that you were about to take several years off the life of your cardiovascular system.

Argentinian Beef
I don’t think we get a lot of beef from Argentina imported to Alberta, but I’ve heard good things about a steak from the Argentine. Sure enough, they have them here in Frankfurt, and I have to say they have been amazing. I’ve had an Argentinian fillet twice now, and both times I was more than pleasantly surprised at just how amazingly good a three-inch block of cow can taste.

Frankfurt: city of bankers
There is a giant Euro in the centre of the city, and I think it explains a lot about this place. The city seems to put things together that wouldn’t normally go together, and does it without blinking. In another city, it might seem like cheek, but here it is just the order of the day. Frankfurt has postmodern skyscrapers next to medieval squares, and around the corner is a giant statue of what appears to be a stylized Gumby. There are trains, river barges, girls girls girls, and an eight-storey shopping mall that is essential one big elevator shaft. M.C. Escher may very well have got the inspiration for his famous interior by standing at the top of this mall, which turns out to be chock a block with stores for teenagers. Yesterday we looked, just to take a few examples, at Kurt Cobain dolls that talk when you pull their string, giant vinyl stickers that put shadows of plants on the livingroom wall, and a toaster that scorches the bread with a skull and crossbones.

Four Suffering Impressionists
We went to see an art exhibit that featured four women impressionists who it appears are often mentioned together: Mary Cassatt, Marie Bracquemond, Berthe Morisot, and Eva Gonzales. They were trying to be professional painters in the late Victorian period, when a respectable woman couldn’t leave home unaccompanied. The Louvre, it turns out, was particularly useful because you could meet other artists there without compromising your reputation. What we saw was room after room of pictures, the subjects of which were the sources of the oppression of these women: domestic settings, children, other women, many of whom were fooling around with a stocking or a shoe. It was ghastly in the extreme, although I have to say there was a particularly melancholy winter landscape by Marie Bracquemond that I liked very much. The colours are all muted browns and the entire thing is overlayed with swatches of white, conveying perfectly to my mind a particular kind of winter scene that I’ve known well.