This is a cool site: www.altfrankfurt.com. The site contains a collection of amazing photographs that illustrate Frankfurt before World War II, and mostly prior to the turn of the century.

Once the best-preserved medieval city in Europe, Frankfurt of modern times is quite a different beast. I had the good fortune to spend a little time there and I can honestly say that the place has an ill-deserved reputation as cheesy. Sure, there’s plenty of ultra-yuppie pseudo-hipsterism, especially around the Financial District. But Frankfurt also has an amazing skyline that includes most of Europe’s tallest buildings, and the juxtaposition of old, rebuilt and mod is quite something to take in. Additionally, it feels like, despite its bank-vault reputation, it’s got soul.

Of course, I can’t say much for my hotel when I was there. I had a rented mobile phone, so I scrambled to find a place to stay. The first vacancies I found were good enough, I figured, so we headed to this hotel, which was only a short distance from the train station—a seven or eight-dollar cab ride.

I intentionally picked an area to focus my search on that was a bit more “working class” and not quite touristy because, well, it was my wife’s first visit to Germany and, having spent quite a bit of time there in the past, I’ve always felt that the coolest places are those that are more “homey” and have Stammtisch rules. But when we got out of the cab, I have to say that it was pretty plain vanilla-looking in this neighborhood, and a bit dirty and definitely ethnic—lots of Turkish kids cruising around with soccer balls, a bit of an Eastern-European vibe in the markets. Quite frankly, I think we ended up in the semi-hood. Compared to Atlanta hood, it was Disney-quality, but if my friends from the North of Germany had seen it, they would have high-tailed it out of there, despite their propensity for cruising red light districts all over the north in their Mercedes to check out the “Reubens Girls”—their euphemism for “fat chicks.” Oh, and I should mention the fact that my friends from the North of Germany (they say it like it should be capitalized like that) are women. But I digress.

When we checked in at the hotel’s fake-wood-paneled front desk, the Chinese owner or manager said to me (in German), “oh, I thought you were German! You’re German is great!” I thanked him and asked him for directions to some place or another. When I asked him to repeat something, he said (in English), “I say it only one time!” and broke off the instructions.

Everywhere I turned, the gypsy housekeeper seemed to be there. I went out to get towels, there she was. I went to the desk to get a map, she was lurking on the landing of the stairs behind me.

We decided to do a quick walking tour of the city and caught a street car to only remaining “old” part of the city. We strolled through the red light district and saw the freaks and druggies. We strolled the red light district and saw the freaks and the druggies. We had a lemonade on the Hauptwache and strolled the Zeil (some of Frankfurts pedestrian areas). We found this cool street (can’t remember the name) where all of the houses were designed by a different architect and were really cool. We checked out some Roman ruins, saw some churches and stopped for lemonades or radlers (half lemonade/half beer) periodically. It was a sunny, perfect day and it felt great to have arrived in Europe, prepared to embark on a longish-trip to Italy. We shopped for sunglasses and then walked back to the hotel via the Financial District at rush hour, which felt amazing to see these industrious Germans pouring out of the office towers for the day, and we’re half-cocked wearing short-sleeved shirts and doing the leisurly stroll thing. We ate (well, I did, because Halane’s a vegetarian and we pretty much only found boiled potatoes for her to try) and headed back to the hotel.

Everything was still sufficiently creepy at our hotel The gypsy housekeeper was vaguely pretty, but very, very strange-looking—lurking in the shadows with her laundry basket or slinking around wearing Capri pants and a shower slippers. Her mass of black curls grown out Mariah-style, but her dark, dark but flashing eyes contrasted sharply with her pale-olive skin. She lookd a bit Asia Argento-ish, come to think of it, but definitely taller (6 feet) and lankier. A siren convention on the street outside our window from 3-4 A.M. managed to eliminate any hope of a good night’s sleep. I can only guess as to the purpose or reason. bit it certainly got us over that “oh Europes so different even the sirens are charming” thing.

In the morning, I had a freaky spider bite on my leg that turned purple and remained with me all the way to Bolzano two weeks later.