Surprisingly Frankfurt airport was much easier to navigate than I had anticipated. Because it is one of the largest airports in Europe, I was expecting massive throngs of people, crowds around never-ending baggage carousels, and pickpockets waiting around every corner. All of this left this timid-first-time-to-Europe American student prime prey to the imminent threats that awaited me.
Instead, everything was quite easy to maneuver. The hardest part was actually the Bahn (train) system.
First reaction: German trains are punctual--very punctual. Second reaction: carrying multiple, heavy, cumbersome, large suitcases can be very tiring.
Because there is no slack in the train schedule and a lack of elevators, making the train times can leave one out of breath very easily.
All unintended exercising aside, the trains are nicely set up and are very good at blocking out the noise of the train itself, particularly the ICE (express trains).
While seeing the German landscape fly by through my window, one thing that struck me was the similarity of the landscape of that to the United States. I don’t really know what I was expecting to see, perhaps castles and extremely crowded population centers, but instead there were fields of green, marked by the occasional concentration of houses.
More resemblance could be drawn every time the train stopped at a station. If it were not for the German text on billboards and station signs, I probably would not be able to tell a U.S. train station apart from the ones I just saw.
Just a theory, but I feel as if that the prominence of graffiti throughout Germany is an act of rebellion against a very a rigid society. The punctuality of the trains is only one indicator of a society which runs like a Swiss watch. There are literally rules for everything.
If that rebelliousness is a fairly American trait, perhaps one reason as to why Germany seems so similar to the U.S. is that the U.S has imported some of it's own culture into German thought, or vice versus.
In addition, I had not expected to see any graffiti, as I had always figured it to be particular to American culture. Instead, the mark of nighttime artistry or hooliganism was visible at every train station, and on many walls.