Frankfurt, Film Fest, Christmas Decorating

Been a while since I updated this, so there's a lot missing, but I'll try not to ramble for too long. The pictures are chronologically backwards.

First is my christmas tree. I went out and bought it yesterday. It's a live tree-still in a container, so it's heavy, and I got some funny looks hauling that thing back to my house...more funny looks than normal. I decorated it with Kristin's extra ornaments, stuff I found outside, things I cut out of magazines, then I got a strand of lights for it....oh...and I topped it with a Cottbus Film Festival pyramid...it's cute.

Second is a picture of the pavement during the week of the film festival. They painted these lines all over the city, and you could follow them to the various theaters where the movies were playing. They also changed a number of light bulbs in the city to blue, which I guess is tradition. I ended up seeing 12 movies during the festival. I liked 1. There were some others that were okay, but the only one I really liked was called The Wedding Chest. It won the audience prize at the end too.

The next 6 pictures are of my last hour or so in Frankfurt. The pictures look exactly like it looked that day. The sky was really dark gray, then the sun came out and made it look really eerie.

The next is the Frankfurt main train station. It's a good-lookin' train station.

The next pic is of the only building in Frankfurt that was built by a Japanese company. It's also the only building in Frankfurt that's earthquake proof....which wouldn't do it much good in an earthquake considering the high rise buildings surrounding it would probably tumble down on top of it.

Look close at the next picture, and you might be able to tell that most of that building is actually a picture. They are doing construction on that building, which isn't particularly attractive, so they blow up a big picture of the building and put it out front...clever, eh? We saw them do that in Berlin to. I like it.

Then an opera house.

Then a cool statue.

Then a statue of justice. Notice that she doesn't have a blindfold on. This was intentional, because she faces the townhall, and it was supposedly so she could keep an eye on the lawmakers....not because Germans don't believe that justice should be blind.

Next is the only wooden house that survived WWII. All of the houses in this area used to be so close together that people could basically reach out and shake hands, so they knew that if any part of this area was bombed that fire would spread to all of the houses. So they dug tunnels between all the houses, and the plan if bombed was to run through these tunnels to this designated house, where they would pump water from the Main River onto it. It worked. Lots of people were saved as a result. I'm not sure what their plan was if that house had been directly hit.

The final two are of the Frankfurt skyline by day and night. It was strange to see high rise buildings; that seems so un-European. But our tour guide explained that Frankfurt has these buildings for a few reasons. For one, the city can't expand outward, because it's bordered by mounatins on one side, and on the other sides by cities they haven't been able to annex- so they have to expand upward. Additionally, Frankfurt has been funded by a lot of private investors who want these sorts of buildings for prestige and what not. There's also a law here that says that all offices here have to at least one window to the outside.

I had a really good time in Frankfurt. It was good to meet up with OU alum and our tour guide was great. It was also good just to get out of Cottbus for a weekend.

For Thanksgiving I had a traditional Polish meal made by my friend Monika. The Christmas markets have begun. I went to the one here in Cottbus, and I was hoping there would be ornaments, but they mostly just had glühwein...a hot wine that they make for the holidays. But I'm going to Dresden's Christmas market with Monika and a teacher, and I've heard the market there is much much better.

That's plenty for now. Thanks for the comments, and hope everyone is doing well!