2 October

For a full list of all trip photos, click here. For more on the technical specs behind these photos, click here. For the text entry that accompanies these photos, click here.

First seven photos: Breakfast with Dirk and Sonja. 'Breakfast' in Germany is quite the different concept than most of us Americans think of it; I was raving about it all the time last year, so am glad to have finally gotten some photos of one. As you can see, the German continental breakfast is an entire full meal by itself; it always consists of at least fresh breads, meats, cheeses and spreads, and sometimes with such variables as fruits, vegetables, Irish-style beans and bacon, and a half-dozen other options. Add milk, multiple juices, strong coffee (many times from a Turkish press), cigarettes, sleepy conversation and '80s European new-wave music in the background, and you've got yourself a German breakfast. Klasse!

Next twelve photos: Random tourist shots from Bockenheim, one of the two "slacker neighborhoods" (or "Lebenskuenstler Distrikts," auf Deutsch) of Frankfurt. More specific comments sometimes inserted where needed.

Exzess, a former 'squathouse' (that is, where the building was legally abandoned but a group of homeless punk kids lived there and took care of it - German police were surprisingly tolerant of this in the 1980s), now a legitimate business, a punk club legally owned by the kids and which pays taxes to the city. See the good things you can do when you don't just go into every situation by blowing everyone up? Are you listening, George W. Bush?

The old-style German telephone booth...yeah, just like Manny uses in Run Lola Run! These are disappearing as fast from public sidewalks as the red ones in the UK and the clear ones in the US; there are still a fair amount of them around, though, especially in an older, bigger city like Frankfurt.

Man, the bike paths in Germany are so great. Unlike America, they actually designate part of the sidewalk as exclusively for bikers (seen in this example as the black-colored tiles in the sidewalk, versus the red ones for pedestrians). Sometimes the bike path curves out onto the street, but even then they paint a full path on the asphalt for the biker that car owners are not allowed to enter. Every road, every sidewalk in Frankfurt has one type of these or another, along with dozens of meandering paths that are designed just for bikers alone. Frankfurters bitch about how poorly their city treats bikers in comparison to other German cities, but I don't think most of them realize just how great they have it.

Next three photos: Out on a bike ride with Dirk, who it turned out had dug up an ex-girlfriend's abandoned bike, tweaked it up and then presented it to me as a free loan for my entire stay there. It turned out to be such a fantastic thing that I'm now planning on getting an extra bike here in Chicago just for such situations in reverse. God, you feel like such a local when you're on a bike in another city...like you belong there. And it's so damn easy to get around most European cities on a bike, both because the cities themselves are much smaller and also because the laws are so much more bike-friendly. Ah, der Bicycle - it made my trip to Frankfurt so much more pleasant and speedy and carefree than it could've been.

Next three photos: Me and Dirk on the U-Bahn, making our way to the Bornheim neighborhood (the other slacker district of Frankfurt) for my first performance of the tour, at Salon Franco.

Sonja at Pizzaria Franco, deciding what to eat.

Next four photos: Salon Franco, held in the basement of Pizzaria Franco, this amazing little room full of handpainted frescos and hundreds of tiny little Christmas lights. (These photos don't do it justice.) The evening is a variety show of sorts, with poets and writers and musicians and the occasional stand-up comedian. It's sponsored by the artistic collective Bloeck{&}Baend.

Next five photos: Whoo man did we get drunk at Salon Franco! Beware the fatal combination of free beer and German beer; it'll get you fucked up quicker than a poet on payday. These are shots from the Bornheim U-Bahn station, drunk and taking photos of each other and just being goofy.

Copyright 2004, Jason Pettus. All rights reserved. Although this material is presented here for your enjoyment free of charge, it is still illegal to repost this material without my permission, and especially so if you charge others money to see it. I am usually happy to let others reprint my work in the context of a free artistic publication, so please don't hesitate to contact me at ilikejason at hotmail dot com if you are interested in doing so.