Part V: Frankfurt, Friends, & Future Festivals
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Our thirteen-hour flight was honestly not too shabby, as we received economy-plus for our seat assignments.
We were in the first row behind the second galley on our 747-400, bound for Frankfurt, Germany. The type of aircraft is actually very interesting in this instance, as there are only 24 of these planes left operating commercially in the entire world. Our butts are always very fortunate to get a seat on any plane, but they were especially lucky to be on this particular plane.
I was never fortunate enough to see what the upper level of the plane looked like, but I’ve heard it’s super neat. A new side mission is to see what it’s all about up there one day.
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Our seats behind the galley offered us more room in a general sense. There were no rows in front of us and the seats were slightly wider than the standard economy seat; being that we were in economy-plus.
With the lack of any rows in front us of, however, it created somewhat of a negative loophole. Usually, a blessing in disguise of any long-haul flight in economy is the ability to stretch out and shove your legs in the space beneath the row in front of you. This is the case even with the very last row in economy. There is always enough room.
Except for our row. It offered no such luxury. Therefore, this also forced us to get a bit creative with space-management. Our legs, carry-on bags, and whatever other miscellaneous things we needed during those twelve hours were all forced to get very intimate with limited breathing room. We had created a lovely backpack, blanket, and leg soup 40,000 feet over a large portion of the Russian airspace.
We managed quite swimmingly though; all things considered.
My laptop, the flight’s first meal, and my TV screen were all forced to become close-knit and best friends. The meal above was splendid: a Korean-styled salad with shrimp, and chili paste to compliment.
Finally arriving after spending our half-day journey glued in our seats, an uber took us to our hotel; where we recovered and took a short rest.
I was thoroughly convinced, from the lack of movement in my extremities, that I had begun the process of rigor-mortis.
Some half-asleep yawns and coming back to reality cured both my fears and symptoms of my previous self-diagnosis.
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Alright, I’m coming back to this after over a year and a half. Whoops. This is as good as procrastination gets. For sure.
It is now December 2024 and I am on the way to New Zealand with the fam bam.
BUT, let’s finish this story.
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We then decided what better way to celebrate the end of said rigor-mortis with a trip to get some grub and go to a bar.
Had some truly fire and genuine German grub; Schnitzel and the biggest & baddest draft of beer this little American had ever laid his eyes on. Truly magical.
The only way to progress was to go find a bar. We rocked up upon a group of about 4 people who looked close enough to us in age. They ended up being 3-4 years older than us, but that didn’t stop a grand time from occurring. After about 20 minutes in the bar, we hopped over to a karaoke place that as the stuff of legends. All of us had our turn to kill it on the mic. And it really just turned into a lot of fun. This photobooth photo was the last thing we got before the night ended and Gracie and I went back to our hotel.
A unique perspective of writing this entry, in general, is that I have actually had some time to think back on it in having to fill the rest of this in. I can genuinely say I believe I will remember this evening forever because of how vivid it still is from over 18 months ago.
< Some fun facts that led from this random encounter: >
They ended up being really good friends with a guy who runs an entire music festival called ‘Heatwave: OpenAir’, based in Bad Soden Sal Münster - a small town about 45 minutes by train outside of Frankfurt. Florian, the first guy we met and approached at the bar, told us to keep that photobooth photo as our entry into the festival once he wrote “Heatwave ticket” on the back of it. And that we just did. We were back in Frankfurt 11 months later at the festival and had a great time. I personally had such a ‘great’ time that I never got off at our train stop when it was time to go back to Frankfurt to meet up with my mom and grandma. We ended up in Gdansk, Poland instead of Warsaw on the next leg of our trip. But that’s a story for another day.
Florian and I kept in good contact and have ever since; I visited him 3 months after this original encounter in October of 2023 and got a mini tour of Frankfurt with Laura as well, another girl from the karaoke evening. I also met Rick on this trip, who I became close with and would see again when we went to Heatwave.
I also met up with Florian in Tokyo, Japan in September of 2024, where we went to different areas and photographed various temples. Also had killer ramen and Japanese beer.
And, my sister and I plan on making a yearly trip to Bad Soden for Heatwave. We were there in the beginning.
Cheers, and my upmost apologies for being so late with this. I won’t have another 18 month past-due error.
