Crash Landing; Zombie Roamings; Journey Along the Rhine

It's the middle of the night on an airplane from Philadelphia to Frankfurt. The lights are off, the plane is quiet. The boisterous and exceedingly smelly Austrian couple sitting next to me have fallen asleep at odd angles. Only a few passengers are still awake, flipping through the complimentary TV with a thin line of spittle hanging from their chins. Alas, still brimming with anxiety about my trip to Germany and the archival and academic pressures that await, I am one of those passengers. Over the course of those seven hours, I:

1) Chatted with the Austrians, whose accent I found nearly unintelligible, and about whom I felt deeply conflicted given the combination of their extreme friendliness and awful B.O.

2) Alternated between futile attempts at sleep and watching Avatar for the third time, a film that I'm supposed to dislike for its stereotyped Pocahontas-like depiction of Native Americans and its predictable plot, but that I secretly love

3) Stared into space like a Zombie, unable to accept the fact that the neck pillow I bought is actually less comfortable than no neck pillow

I arrived in Frankfurt not having slept for a minute, and forced myself to stay awake for the next 12 hours. A sage traveler's tip: if you need to force yourself to stay awake, don't spend your entire afternoon at the Botanic Garden. 

Lake with paddleboats: 5 minutes sleep

Tunnel under waterfall: strongly considered curling up to sleep but noticed proliferation of spiders.

Greenhouse: no benches. Left abruptly.

What ended up happening is that I was too exhausted to walk around, so I moved from bench to bench throughout the garden for a period of four hours, falling asleep with my head on my hand, all the while feeling perteptually paranoid that someone would see me sleeping and chase me out with a broom shouting Pennerin! Pennerin! I couldn't enjoy the flowers because I was so busy hunting for a bench where no one would pass by, so that I could actually lie down, and finally found one, only to be prodded awake by a gardener. There was one desperate moment when I strongly considered clambering into a patch of bamboo forest and sleeping on a bed of leaves.

Staying awake was a little easier in the old downtown Römer square.

Super cute square!

Just want to pinch little Frankiefurt's cheekies.

Though of course it didn't help that the weather was dark, gloomy, rainy and cold, as every day has been since I got here. Sommer, wo bist du?

After a night with my friendly and generous hosts in Frankfurt, I boarded the train for Bonn. The train curves along the Rhine, passing by cheek-pinchy little towns, steep farms carved into the mountainsides, and on several occasions, medieval castles on the mountaintop overlooking the town below. (It was hard to tell whether the castles were actually medieval, or the fake-medieval that was a favorite in 19th century Germany.)

The Rhine curves.

Little towns.

It's a castle.

Agriculture! (Night on bald mountain?)

Eventually I made it to Bonn, which will have its own series of entries.

Things I learned:
1) Alcohol is much cheaper in Germany: a good bottle of local white wine can cost only a few euros
2) Coffee is much more expensive in Germany: a simple cup of black coffee usually costs 2-3 euros, which is the equivalent of 3-4 dollars
3) When adapting to a new time zone, just give in and buy the damn coffee.