We knew that it was going to be hard being in a country where we had no idea how to speak the language, but it came as a shock how hard it actually was! Luckily for us, it was only a day trip, but we were still tired and worn out from asking people if they spoke English after that short of a time…
On of the least tiring times we had, however, was on Friday night, a couple of hours after we arrived, when we decided to go out to dinner with some friends! While some of the other people from our group went out for Italian, The Husband and I decided that if we were going to splurge and take our poor student selves out to dinner, it had to be something authentically German!
After walking around the town (that was shockingly overflowing with asian and italian restaurants), we found the only German place and walked on in to order our food. Luckily they had English menus, because we were having none of that order-something-and-hope-it-turns-out-good stuff. Shortly after arriving, we noticed that everyone, I mean EVERYONE was smoking and drinking beer in the place. Turns out we accidentally went and sat down in the bar room of the restaurant rather than the family room — whoops! Lucky for us no one enforced those legal drinking age rules here, so we were still able to sit in the bar! Our food was delicious — we started out with some fancy German sparkling water, then moved onto an appetizer of Haribo Pandas that I had bought earlier (hello — Germany is the land of Haribo! You don’t even want to know how many bags of haribo I bought this weekend…), and then got our HUGE meals! Pasta for me, frankfurters with a hot bretzel for Andrew, and one other frankfurter meal, and a hawaiian pizza for the littlest (turns out Germans are huge on Hawaiian everything. Who knew? They even had Hawaiian croissant sandwiches at the bakery we went to the next morning…)
We rounded off our 3+ hour meal with four plates of apple strudel — a region speciality! Definitely a must have if you’re in the Frankfurt area. When the bill came, we could hardly believe it! Only 50 euro for five meals, four desserts, and two bottles of sparkling water! Moral of the story: leave Paris if you’re poor students. Everything is cheaper…
As we were leaving, we realized that we all smelled like ash trays… Never mind the fact that none of us smoke and were spending the night at a religious building… Let’s just say it was a tad bit awkward when we walked back in after a three hour absence smelling like bar. At least the food was worth it, right?
P.S. Yeah, not gonna lie. I packed a TON of dairy into these two days on vacation. My stomach hurt like there was no tomorrow, and I had some breathing problems, but I wouldn’t change it for the world. I love cheese!
