Our flight from San fran to Frankfurt was pretty uneventful.
We just took an airbus A380…
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its a huge plane, two full decks. and there was a video camera in the tail so you could see the whole airplane. and the flight felt super stable. its just a massive airplane cutting through the air. have to hit some pretty big turbulence to shake that bad boy.
we arrived and our friend mathias picked us up from the airport, which happend to be the same week as a year ago when i went for Marie & Sebi’s wedding.
i did manage to snap a nice sunrise over the atlantic
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mathias dropped us off at his dad’s house in mainz, we had lunch with him, and then we crashed for a few hours. Charlie came home, we had a great dinner and lots of wine with him. Therefore we (I) passed out that evening, managed to sleep through the night, and woke up the following morning with the plan to go visit Wiesbaden, my childhood home. the idea was to show noa around for the afternoon, to see where i lived and some of the places i went to school, and then return to mainz for dinner.
mainz is just across the rheine from wiesbaden, so we took the train across the river to the hauptbahnhof.
its a pretty impressive train station. Wiesbaden was mostly not bombed during the war, so a lot of the grand buildings are still around.
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from there we walked up the hill towards the house i grew up in for 8 years. we had the second story as our apartment. the building looked very newly renovated.
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from there we walked the one block to my kindergarden.
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and then onwards to where i went to elementary school.
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its weird. i remember a lot more about my kindergarden then elementary school. i can clearly picture the classrooms of the former, but of the elementary school, all i can remember is the outside and the courtyards. theres nothing indoors. its like one of those dreams where everything is normal, and then you walk through a door, and its just black inside. thats how i feel.
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and from there we walked towards downtown, to see some of the sights. i mostly knew my way around. there were a few new buildings here and there, but overall not too much changed. mostly my perspective on things i suppose, since i have not been back in a long long time.
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my parents saw a lot of opera here.
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we found one of the Kochbrunnen, or smelly rotten egg springs, or if you prefer sulphur water. as we got up to it and smelled the stink, i told noa people drink it, and she looked at me like, don’t f with me. and just then, a woman walked up with a plastic cup, fills it, and takes a giant swig. i just got a smug look. but yuck, i dont know how that can be good for you.
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this is what they look like over time
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continuing our journey to downtown, we saw some more sights, and stopped somewhere for lunch
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we had a really nice day walking around, and it was great to show noa a little bit of my childhood. i dont know if it was the jetlag, or what, but it was odd walking around there again. also, i know theres always been a huge english population, but in the past no one spoke english, and this time i felt like the city was overflowing with english speaking teenagers who were on their summer break. it was really odd. but it was nice to be back.