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After getting back from München on Sunday evening, I happened upon the computer lab at GTL (normally locked at this time) and played around with train schedules some, since my two tests in Rhode's classes had been moved back to Thursday from Wednesday. Thus, I decided that school wasn't really that important and that I should do something fun (history has shown this to not always be the best decision, but it didn't hurt this time). Then ensued a few hours of quick phone/email tag with Megan, as I basically invited myself over to her place. (There was somewhat of a standing invitation, but I think last-minute is a little too nice of a way to put it).
In any case, after going to my 9 and 10am classes on Monday morning, I ran like heck to catch the bus to the train station. Luckily, I got the bus that gave me plenty of time. The other option left something like 8 minutes for buying a ticket, which isn't nearly enough, considering SNCF's lightning-fast counter service. Thus, I caught the 11:54am train from Metz to Frankfurt, arriving at 15:06. Megan met me in the Hauptbahnhof wearing a pair of roller blades, which was amusing to me because her proficiency on said devices has increased a whole lot from when she started on them at Tech last year.
We walked around Frankfurt for a little while until both of us figured out that touristing in the big city wasn't our main objective, so then we took a U-bahn back to the Hbf and then a regional train to Walldorf-Mörfelden, the small set of cities where Megan's apartment is. Walldorf and Mörfelden are actually quite separate places; she lives in Walldorf. I never got a good idea of the city's size, but it was definitely fairly small.
It's a ten minute walk from the train station to her apartment, which is on the 2nd floor of a nice building across from one of the main churches in town. The kitchen was really nice, and in general the place pretty large by German standards (although I have to admit that most of my experiences with German houses have been in cities). The patio is nice, with plenty of room for a barbecue or whatnot and a nice view out over the surrounding town.
We waited around for a while, and then Dawn showed up with her sister Christine and more importantly, the car. (j/k). Through whatever magical incantations and monetary expenditures, Dawn can actually legally drive a car in Germany. These things don't come too easily, although I suppose she did the transition from a license in the states and then took the German test, thus bypassing the expensive Fahrschule in Germany. In any case, after introductions we headed over to neighboring Wiesbaden, where the US armed forces housing place has a strip-mall with all of the accouterments of small town American life. There's a DODDS high school (perhaps 600 students) nearby, which Megan graduated from, and in the shopping center there's:
After all this, we went back to Megan's place to get cleaned up for the festival in Mainz. Getting to Mainz isn't that difficult, although parking was interesting (I think we managed to raise the blood pressure of a DB Polizei man who was guarding the railroad tracks. I can't imagine that it would be fun to fill out an incident report explaining why you let a carful of American teenagers get mauled by a train when you had four officers working the crossing). From there we went across the bridge in to the festival area, where we milled around the arts and crafts area. As it got a little darker outside we wandered toward the crepe place, and then the fireworks started.
Riverboat in Mainz (picture taken from bridge)
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Megan shopping at the festival
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Seriously, this carnival ride illustrates one of the most glaring differences between Europe and the states. In the US, it's the burden of the provider to keep stupid people from doing stupid things (i.e. fences around pools, attractive nuisance, etc). In Europe, it's moreso nobody's fault but your own. My personal feelings lie somewhere in the middle, but this carnival ride was quite impressive.
For background, you can read about the tragedy that happened in Austin a while back. (This was due to equipment failure, and IMHO the carnival was completely at fault in this case). 1 2 3
Anyways, these are the pictures of the ride. The checkerboard patterned thing spins around, and the cars with people in them spin around with an additional two degrees of freedom. The yellow line on the platform is the death line; the plane perpendicular from the platform up to about 3 meters high is where the edge of the car swings when it's rotating around. If you had your face in this line, you'd probably suffer a debilitating head injury.
The next day we went to Wiesbaden some more and explored around.
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A view of Wiesbaden from a small hill
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Megan and I went on a bike ride in the area around her house, and ended up going quite a long ways. These are some pictures from along the way.
One of the gates to the Frankfurt airport. Note the barbed wire. There
were also lots of pannable cameras.
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The bike path by the airport, with the air traffic control radar in
the background.
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Mmmm... Tostitos and Dr. Pepper.
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Laura and Megan, up on the hill over Wiesbaden. None of the other
night pictures really came out.
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Ever wandered what a nice train looks like on the inside? I didn't
think so, but just in case, here's some shots:
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Metz decided to put some flowers up just outside the Gare. Apparently,
they do this every summer. In any case, it's really pretty now.
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Random:
Interesting people we met on the train: Sheila, from California, who
made a last-minute decision to not get married and has been traveling
Europe for the last five months.
