Frankfurt on the last day was kinda cool. Though I was obsessing over the fact that I had mis-planned my whole trip and that I should have stayed one more day in Berlin so that I could pay a visit to Sachsenhausen, which has a Concentration Camp Memorial, the last day turned out pretty ok. One of the great big advantages of traveling alone is that you are forced to make new friends, and so that is how I contacted AK, who's a friend of a friend of mine I went to college with. AK, a PhD degree holder in Physics from Oxford now lives and works in Frankfurt. The advantages of going sight-seeing with a local guy is that he'll know about obscure details like which shop stocks the cheapest German chocolates, the kind I want to know when I am travelling to Europe. So AK picked me up from my hostel and we roamed around the city for quite a while, went on a cruise on Main river which has some awesome views of the city riverfront, and finally had some German dinner: a highpoint certainly, thinking that it was my first turkey dish!
What I loved about Frankfurt (and this is true in general about European cities) is how they have maintained their heritage with the lovely old buildings that were rebuilt after the war in exactly the same style, the cobbled roads which have not been concretised, the squeaky-clean statues which are free from bird-shit, colorful trams that made me feel sad for the rickety ones back in Calcutta, lots of museums and open-spaces that had a happy feel about that, not the feeling of neglected, dark buildings which nobody bothered to visit in India. Oh and the river. Very tough anti-pollution laws in place that nobody dares to break by bribing the authorities. A clean river that brings much beauty to the city, lined with tree-shaded roads where I could see people jogging, cycling or walking even in that cold weather. A scene that onec again brough back unhappy memories of the Yamuna in Delhi and the Ganga in Cal, rivers nearly choking in its own filth, slowly dying, unloved and uncared for.