Over-eating in the airport lounge again

Since we had gotten used to having food every two hours at Schloss Dagstuhl, we were hungry at Frankfurt airport. We had had a huge lunch, but we had missed the "cake time" and it was about time for dinner anyway. Luckily, my boss travels in business class (and since we have almost no travel money this year, I get the cheapest tickets they can find) and can invite one guest to the lounge. So I spent a few hours eating more sausages (which were quite good, though not as good as the sausages we had in Erfurt). There was also Swedish vodka available, of course.

Swedish chocolate in a German airport!

At Frankfurt airport I shopped around for some souvenirs to bring back to Japan (the Japanese custom says you have to give gifts to everyone you have ever met, more or less, after every trip you have been to, which might explain why the Japanese do not go abroad very much). In most airports around the world you can find Swedish vodka, but this time you could even find Swedish chocolate (Marabou). I bought German chocolate instead, but still.

Frankfurt breakfast

We had to catch a bus from the Frankfurt airport at 13:15 so we had plenty of time for breakfast. Since it was Sunday (always a good day to spend working, I guess) the breakfast was open from 7 to 11. There was a lot of good stuff that you could not find in Japan, so I had too much food for breakfast.

Frankfurt

We had to spend one night in Frankfurt on our way to Dagstuhl, since we were told that Dagstuhl was in the middle of nowhere, too far away, and closed when we would have arrived if we went straight there.

Our secretary had booked us into a hotel very close to the Frankfurt main station, which also meant we were right on the outskirts of what seemed to be the prostitution and gambling area.

We took a walk to an old square were tourists go, and had some German looking food in a restaurant where over half the guests were Japanese and all the Germans also spoke some Japanese. Very authentic German food, I am sure.

I wore a t-shirt saying "I am not Japanese" in Japanese, and a car that randomly had to stop when we wanted to cross the street turned out to be full of Japanese people who pointed at me and wondered why someone in Frankfurt looking like me would need such a shirt.

There were lots of bachelorette parties going on, and we kept running into different groups of girls in strange outfits.

This shopping mall had a hole in it.

The hole from the inside.

The cathedral, seen through the weird glass windows of the shopping mall.

Magic!

The opera house.

This sushi placed is called "My Sushi" in Japanese.

There was lots of broken glass in Frankfurt.

More broken glass.

German cars.

There were some pretty long and straight avenues near the river.

There was a sign stating that a steam train sometimes runs by here.

The river.

Homeless person sleeping near the river.

A Euro monument.

Something that once was a bicycle, still locked to the fence.

Frankfurt airport lounge

We had two or three hours in Frankfurt waiting for our flight to Japan. We managed to get into the lounge after my colleague had had to strip off a lot of clothes in the security check and I had managed to convince the woman in the lounge lobby to let us in. We had tickets that allowed us into the JAL lounge because they were "economy premium". The woman looked at our tickets and saw "economy" and some confusion followed. I explained that we had the same kind of tickets on our way to Europe too, and then we were allowed in so probably they should work now too. She asked when we came here and since that was four days ago she explained that that benefit had expired... Which was not really the point of my explanation. Finally another woman showed up and took one look at our tickets and then let us in. She also checked us in on our domestic flight from Tokyo to Sapporo at the same time.

The lounge had a less impressive selection of food than the Tokyo lounge, but there were some nice sausages, potatoes, bread, and meat balls.