One Night in Frankfurt
Wednesday 01/06/2010 12:07 PM
We're back in Ohio and both of us are back in school, but I still haven't finished this blogging spree. To say that I'm reluctant to do so is an understatement. But as fine a country as Montenegro is, I don't think it's right to just leave you hanging at the airport. We flew to Frankfurt on the 23rd and spent the night. I told Alex in advance that I'd planned a Frankfurt surprise for him, and once we got settled in our hotel room, we headed out. We took a taxi to a ceramics shop I'd read about and then told him we could walk to the surprise from there. I took him to an indoor market and told him this was the surprise: wasn't it cool? all these different stalls with authentic German products? how cool was that?
He tried to hide his initial disappointment and said, "Yeah," but I know he was wondering why I was acting so excited when we'd explored these in nearly every country we'd visited. So we wandered the stalls, sampled lots of goodies, bought a few things to bring home, and gawked at the meat selections:
Alex headed down the stairs excited to see fish and then slowed near the bottom when he saw the guy in the background, pick one out of the tub and clean it (Merry Christmas!):
When we got back to the street, I told him that the market wasn't the real surprise and that I would have to blindfold him for the walk around the corner to the real deal. He was more than a little self-conscious, and excited, and confused as I realized that the surprise wasn't actually "around the corner," but around the corner and down a couple of blocks. We had to walk through a pretty crowded pedestrian mall, passing a couple of street musicians along the way, which just added to his disorientation:
Once I got him positioned in front of the Lego store we'd visited on our first trip to Frankfurt, though, I took the blindfold off and told him that I was giving him a Lego shopping spree for Christmas. He was ecstatic. He's been watching Lego building videos on youtube and cruising the Lego website for new products for months.
I set up camp in a kid-sized chair next to a building table while he shopped. Of course, it was a very serious process and took lots of deliberation. We switched from one huge lego box and a couple of small ones to a pile of several lego boxes and back to the big one again several times.
Finally, he settled one one large Lego set and two smaller ones:
Afterwards, we found a place for schnitzel and streudel, and Alex was delighted to find HEINZ ketchup for the first time in months:
On our way back to the hotel, we found the spot where the Frankfurt Christmas market had been. Earlier, I'd planned that we could go there as well as the Lego store, but then I learned that the last night of the market was the night before the one we spent in Frankfurt. The tree was still lit, though:
The next morning, we flew out to Charlotte, North Carolina ... and then Tallahassee to be reunited with Freya, Calvin, and Peter & Candy.
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