Marburg Here I Come

Traveling to a foreign country is always an adventure, so I wanted to start my German adventure off right and on the plane I watched The Lorax in German and drank Warsteiner beer.

I was on a direct flight from Denver to Frankfurt on the German airline Lufthansa. I think our top height was 37,000 feet and our speed was between 500 and 650 miles per hour. The person sitting next to me was a bit weird and we didn’t talk much at all and I wasn’t able to sleep much, so the 8 or so hours passed by really slowly. I was really anxious to get off the plane, but at the same time I was really nervous because getting off the plane meant wandering around in Germany all by myself for the first time.

It was cloudy when we landed in Frankfurt, and after everyone shuffled off the plane I waved goodbye to Lufthansa and went to get my checked bag and tourist visa.

My program had given me rough directions on how to navigate the airport and how to get a train ticket to Marburg, but the issue I had was this: I arrived on Sunday at 11:30AM and there wouldn’t be anyone to pick me up at the train station in Marburg until Monday at 8:00AM, so I needed to find somewhere to sleep. My plan was to spend the night in Frankfurt at a hostel, because the ones in Marburg were full, and take the train to Marburg in the morning. With this in mind, I went up to the ticket counter and asked if he spoke English (he did). I explained that I needed to go to Marburg, but I wanted to stay in Frankfurt tonight. He replied, “That is not possible,” and printed out a ticket to Marburg that left in an hour or so. I blinked, confused, and took my ticket and walked out to the platforms. “I guess I’m going to Marburg,” I thought to myself.

I had to take two trains—one that was only 15 minutes from the airport to the main train station in Frankfurt and another from there to Marburg that was about an hour. On the first, shorter train I had an encounter with my first ever German panhandler. He was wearing a cape and had a mullet, but he spoke English, so that was a bit humbling :/

Once I got to the Frankfurt train station, figuring out which platform to go to was difficult because it wasn’t anywhere on the ticket (yes I could read the German :P it really wasn’t on there). Instead I just had to look at the main listing and match up the times and such on my ticket and figure it out that way.

When I finally got to Marburg it was 3PM, meaning it felt like 7AM after not sleeping. I had my huge and awkward suitcase and backpack, I was super tired, and had nowhere to stay. I walked out of the train station and picked a direction, and started walking. Luckily only a block away I saw a hotel sign, and I have to say it really was one of the most relieving sights in my whole life.

It was €60 a night, but it came with internet access and breakfast and I really was so tired I didn’t care. I awkwardly interacted with the receptionist and then went up to my room. It was smaller than what I expected for what I paid, but it was nice enough.

I decided since it was only 3 in the afternoon I couldn’t go to bed yet, so I locked my stuff in my room and went for a walk around the city. There is a really beautiful church called elisabethkirche that I would later discover was right in front of a main university building.

The city is sort of divided into two sections that overlap. One is the Altstadt (old city) or Überstadt (over city), which is the old part of the city that is up on a hill surrounding the castle and the rest of the city is more modern and is in the valley to the east of it. This is a view of some of the newer area from up in Überstadt.

Marburg is amazing. It’s so beautiful. I took these pictures of Überstadt a different time, but even in my extremely sleep-deprived state I was amazed.

The streets are all old cobblestone and most of the buildings are the old wood-crisscross style. Since it’s up on top of a hill, nearly all the streets are sloped in one way or another and aren’t at all on a grid.

There are lots of cafes and bars alongside old shops like tailors and butchers and bookstores that have probably been there hundreds of years, and then right alongside there are modern things like cell phone stores and such. Sometimes buses and cars drive on the streets too.

A lot of times the buildings seem to be piled haphazardly together and most of the shops have apartments or other shops above them.

Another common this is lots of little stairways in between buildings, some of which are so narrow that a group would have to go single file. They aren’t sketchy like they would be in America though, and some even have shop entrances there instead of on the main streets.

I managed to walk around the city until 5:30PM or so (9:30AM Denver time), but after that I just couldn’t stay awake anymore. I was really hungry so I went to a Döner shop and had my first döner. They are comparable to a gyro in the US, and because I was incredibly hungry it was maybe the most delicious thing I had ever eaten.

I fell asleep around 6:30 after watching “Avatar the Last Airbender” for a little while in German on the little TV in my room, which was endlessly amusing. I forced myself to stay in bed until 7AM the next morning even though I kept waking up to try to get my schedule normalized.

The breakfast they served was also incredibly delicious. There were at least a dozen types of bread, both in loaf and roll form and all super yummy-looking. The hard boiled eggs were really tasty and fresh, and there were several types of slice meats and cheeses that were all really high quality and fresh. There was also müsli, which is a German cereal that has a lot of granola and other things and is really good and healthy. I would have taken a picture of the spread, but there were too many Germans in the room with me and I was too shy and didn’t want to look like a ridiculous tourist.