I just got back to Paris tonight. What a beautiful city this is, in the evening at Christmas! Every time I start to get a bit blasé(e) about living here, I see the river at night and the lights and the beautiful buildings and it is as if I am seeing it all over again for the first time.
While I was in Frankfurt this week, I visited the Christmas Market. About 100 little stands selling Christmas things, from crèches and Christmas tree ornaments to gingerbread and Glühwein (hot mulled wine). The Glühwein comes in a little cup with "Frankfurt Weihnachtsmarkt" and a little picture of the city on it, and if you want, you can keep it for two euros. If you don't, you return it and get two euros back.
The Christmas Markets are one of the nicest things about Germany. In Paris, they like to spray the city Christmas trees with artificial snow, but in Frankfurt, there is a magnificent natural one in the heart of the city at Römerplatz, with a stage underneath it where there are musical performances. That is it to the left, with the City Hall behind it.
There are many traditions around Christmas in Germany, but one of them is long lines everywhere. Even though there is high unemployment, and even though the stores need to hire more people, they don't. Sometimes there are twenty people ahead of you in line. Everyone seems to think it's normal.
Here is a gingerbread stand at the Christmas market. You can have any message you want written on the heart. I saw one that said (in German), "Happiness is finally getting married to you" and wondered whether the person receiving it would actually be happy.
The center of downtown Frankfurt is Hauptwache, which means Main Watchtower. Here is a photo of the most beautiful skyscraper in Frankfurt (one of the few European cities to have an American-style skyline), seen from Hauptwache and the Christmas Market. This Commerzbank building is so beautiful I looked up its architect on the internet. It was Sir Norman Foster, who also built the infamous London "gherkin."
Frankfurt is also the home of some odd sculpture. It has a couple of huge Euro signs, one at the airport and one downtown, an enormous Hammering Man (a silhouette who brings his hammer up and down), a life-sized subway car that is half crashed into the ground, and this large Tie.
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