Got up earlier than the previous morning and walked to a local bakery to get some rolls for breakfast. Then met up with Peter at “Beutelland,” his flat, which isn’t too far from Tom’s. After a nice, leisurely breakfast of bread, cheese and liverwurst, Tom and I headed back into Frankfurt, where we headed to the Goethe museum (which was also destroyed during the war and rebuilt, though all of the original furniture and paintings were salvaged thanks to the intelligent and timely work of a caretaker) and then we went in search of a good café. We wound up going out to the Universität, where we bumped into Jule and headed out with her for Chinese food afterwards, at an inexpensive tiny place on Bergenstrasse. The Uni building itself is a interesting, since it once housed Nazi offices, then was occupied as a U.S. military high school, and now is a large portion of the state-run university system in Frankfurt. The café was buzzing with activity. As Tom says, the German students seem to spend as much, if not more, time drinking coffee and chatting and debating as they do in bona fide classes.
After lunch, we headed to another café (when in Rome...) and saw Jule’s soon-to-be new apartment. Then, we headed to Hauptbahnhof to buy my bus ticket to Amsterdam. I got a departure on Eurolines the following night at midnight for only € 36, nearly a third the price of the train.
Heading back to Atzelberg, we stopped in at a Plus (sort of like an Aldi – mercenary-style German supermarkets) to pick up some extra supplies for a soirée we had planned for that evening.
Arriving back at the flat, we found Lynn in bad spirits since her Cuban (or as Deutscher Tom would say, Cubisch) boyfriend Israel was being shipped off to Kuwait, as part of the U.S. buildup of troops in the Middle East. Perhaps a party was just what was needed that night.
As for the evening, Sandra and Jule came, as well as Gianmarco, a Franco-Italian friend of Tom’s, two other Italians and several TCNJ folks who were studying abroad in Frankfurt currently. The night went quite well, apart from a bit of broken glass and an odd, wistful departure.
|  | 
|
