Frankfurt: Days 1 & 2

Apparently, we scheduled our trip to Frankfurt during the hottest two weeks of the year. I guess it doesn’t get that hot otherwise, so no one bothers to invest in air conditioning. Our hotel room was sweltering. We got into our hotel around 11:30 PM and spent the rest of the night sweating away.

The next morning, we walked back to the train station and spent quite a while booking a bunch of tickets for the next several places we’ll be going. It took up a lot of our day, but it’s nice to have it done.

When we were done with that, we decided to do another little walking tour through the city. We walked down alongside the river along this cute path with trees whose trunks look like camouflage. It was very nice.

We made our way to a cute little plaza with all these adorable buildings. 

We found out that Goethe’s house was nearby, so we followed the signs there, but when we got there it had already closed. Too bad. I love Faust.

Next, we got dinner at a cute little café that had some amazing desserts. Greg ordered some ice cream that looked like spaghetti.

After dinner, we hurried back to our hotel so that Greg could watch the World Cup Final. I watched too, just not as intently. He even took a picture to commemorate this part of our trip: 

On day two, we took a riverboat tour on the Rhine where we saw at least a dozen castles. They would just randomly pop up all over the place, most of them in really good condition. It was a very relaxing way to see a lot of cool stuff.

The tour took almost the whole day, so after it was over, we went back to the train station, got dinner, and waited for our first overnight train to Vienna. Since we’re already in Vienna, I’ll tell you about that trip now:

We were planning on booking beds for the trip, but we found out that reserving them would cost about $150. However, we found out there was something in between a bed and a seat (the lady who helped us called it a “lying place”) that was much cheaper, so we got that instead. When we got into our little compartment, the seats looked a whole lot more like seats than beds. Also, there was someone in our compartment who didn’t have a reservation there, which made it a lot more crowded than we would have liked. Luckily, he got off at the first stop (about 1:30 in the morning). We figured out how to recline the seats, which made them a little more comfortable too, but it wasn’t a very restful night. Luckily, we only have one more overnight train.