So Tuesday might’ve been the highlight of this trip, for me anyway. We started the day exploring the nicer part of the city, in and around the old town. As you might expect, there’s a big cathedral there! We had a look around inside at all its fancy artwork before moving along. Other important stops include a German Five Guys and a cool (but creepy) antique shop. While our friends from Paderborn enjoyed tasting Five Guys for the the first time, I tried out Mezzo Mix. It’s a popular soda here that claims to be no more than coke and fanta in one cup. It was alright. We walked back to the hotel along the river and soaked in the skyline.
Of course the main event wasn’t in Frankfurt, but Eltville. Eltville is a beautiful little town right on the water, and we were somehow all invited to meet the mayor there. I didn’t find any exciting shopping, but I enjoyed some ice cream and some lahmacun in town before heading down to the shore. The shore was very nice.
To be a bit more specific: the shore was amazing. It was lined by trees leading up to gardens leading up to a castle. I excitedly climbed down to the water and collected pebbles and seaglass while enjoying a cool, nautical breeze. Before exploring the gardens, we enjoyed some long wine (a regional specialty) at an outdoor bar overlooking the river.
After posing for lots of pictures among the roses, the mayor appeared and showed us around the castle. In one of the rooms of its tower, there was a small exhibit about Johannes Gutenberg. From the top, you could see the whole town as well as the neighboring that is supposedly owned by one man.
The rest of the time in Eltville was spent sipping champagne in the garden with the mayor. The temperature was just perfect, and the sun set slowly over the evening. We ate pretzels and cream cheese and talked until it was time to head back.
Talk about a Strand!The real best part: a fountain of pose-able ducks
Monday morning took us back to central station. There we took a high-speed train toward our next destination, Frankfurt. I had taken a train like this from Frankfurt’s airport to Cologne when I first arrived in Germany, and I was pleased to return to those comfortable seats and free wifi.
After being rushed off of this first ride, we made a transfer into a train with only a few open seats. I bounced between sitting on the ground and standing by my luggage in a not-too-cramped open area by the bathroom. As I enjoyed the view from the window however, I noticed the temperature steadily increasing. At first I thought I might be coming down with something, but when the train halted just a few minutes before our stop, you could see everyone glancing around in the same panicked sweat.
By the time we checked in to the hotel, we were already decidedly hot and bothered. The pouring rain luckily waited for us to move in first, but our rooms were even hotter than the train was. Apparently this week is uncharacteristically brutal for the area, and air conditioning is not a standard. I immediately got very anxious about being in such a busy city. Cologne was very large, but every area I explored had some amount of peace to it. Our hotel’s location across from Frankfurt’s train station however, is more like your average NYC street corner.
Luckily I was able to cool off and calm down in a nearby Irish pub with some of the rest of our group. Most of the day since arriving, I was really missing Paderborn. I soon realized how much more there was to do here though, and so I found some peaceful sleep, despite the city heat.
Thursday was the day we were to head to Kalypso, a studio I’ve never really heard of that’s famous for a game series I’ve never really heard of, Tropico. More specifically, Kalypso is an entirely private publisher that is actually kind of a big deal, especially due to being private. They were very nice people, and despite the small size of their space, still managed to seem important simply by handing us all Fritz-Kola with El Presidente, the main figure of Tropico, emblazoned on them, and not after the fact, either; this was a bona fide brand deal. They also had catering, which I didn’t touch, because I don’t eat lunch. Germany sure does feed itself well.
The only picture I got from the trip was the Kola. We were allowed to take pictures (except for one slide which spoiled something; we didn’t sign an NDA, but I’m not going to go any further out of courtesy) but I just didn’t.
After that, we headed to the graveyard. It was gloomy and gray, and it was actually almost cold now, in stark contrast to all the days before. It wasn’t much more than a normal graveyard, to me, but I did take some pictures of some odd and interesting graves.
The graveyard from near the entrance.
Yes, all of that is stone.
The temperature turning toward the cooler end didn’t stop us from going out to get ice cream afterward; we were told by the people of Kalypso that there was a really good ice cream place in Worms. They weren’t wrong!
The ice cream at this place had numerous odd flavors I didn’t understand because I don’t speak German. The germans told me that the flavors mimicked common candies. I hesitated trying any of them out of fear of nuts. I got Oreo and “Raffaello.”
Oreo wasn’t just vanilla with Oreo cookie chunks in it like you’d expect from usual ice cream. It was actually Oreo flavored, and the cookie chunks weren’t directly from Oreos, but rather, like Oreo cookie flavored chunks specially made for the flavor. I don’t know what they were, exactly, but they were good.
Raffaello was a very, VERY profoundly dark chocolate flavor. My mom loves dark chocolate and even she would have to do a double take, it was so dark. It was very good, just pretty startling, especially from an ice cream. If only more ice cream places were this good.
After that, we took a quick shopping break, and headed back. I bought some candy, and while I was, I spotted weed gum. I felt obligated to take a picture, because that sounds like a terrible idea. Whatever works, I suppose.
Once we’d gotten back into Frankfurt, we made our way to a schnitzel place that was a snug fit for our large group. It was a very cozy place, even though the waiters were hard to understand even for the germans and seemed both tired and vaguely disgruntled. The schnitzel was even better than it was at Salzkammer, too; it’s hard to describe its flavor, but it was a unique kind of taste that I can’t recall ever having, and it was really nice. I’m definitely going back if I ever return to Germany.
A picture from the area we were all seated at.
Germans seem to do thick fries far better than America does. Maybe I’ve just not been to the right places in America, or maybe America’s just better at thin fries.
We all paid for Volker’s meal as a token of our appreciation for herding us all to the right places, showing us a good time, and keeping any of us from missing any trains or getting lost around any corners.
To start out our Wednesday, we departed for Nintendo of Germany. Nintendo of Germany doesn’t handle any development, but they do handle localization, which occasionally involves some game tweaking. Regardless, it was really neat to be there.
First, we had a substantially lengthy meeting briefly going over some of Nintendo’s history and past directors, as well as their mission statements, and then going into what Nintendo of Germany specifically does.
The rooms were named after my favorite Nintendo games; Mario 1, Mario 2, Mario 3, and Toad. True classics.
The view out of the meeting room window.
When the meeting was done, and after everyone’s questions had trickled out, we went back downstairs to the ground floor to have lunch. Since me and my family generally don’t eat lunch, I wasn’t hungry. I did, however, get a chocolate chip muffin. I also saw a magnetic pin of Mario smoking a blunt in an official Nintendo office. I can’t tell if that’s beautiful or perverse.
Notice how the wrapper has a very easy to peel rim around it, unlike what I’m used to in America.
We were then shown to what I think was the break room, but it doesn’t really matter what room it was, all that matters is that it was jam packed with neat Nintendo stuff absolutely everywhere.
There was even a gift shop on the floor that I didn’t take a picture of. Reportedly, there were hard to find Amiibos there for cheap, but we had very little time, so my general lack of interest in Amiibos kept me from realizing until it was too late. Me and Sam did, however, buy things, with the help of the woman who was giving us the tour. I got a “Kirby’s Dream Blanket” which I think I’m gonna hang like a poster, and some Legend of Zelda decals for gadgets such as phones, tablets, and laptops. There were some lame, stock image decals in the pack, but also some really nice ones.
After that, we went to visit Crytek. Like Nintendo, we had to sign an NDA, despite the fact we weren’t told anything that wasn’t publicly known in both. Crytek, however, was a little more strict and didn’t want any pictures taken of the studio, which was alright, since there wasn’t much in there that inspired me to take a pic to begin with. It’s hard to compete with Nintendo’s star power, especially when your audience consists of a decent number of Nintendo fanboys.
A lot of the presentation was similar to Nintendo, but unlike Nintendo of Germany, Crytek has developers. We didn’t see too much development going on; in fact, the offices felt particularly empty. I think we arrived at lunch break, and it was also hot today as well, so that may have been a factor.
Our hosts spent a substantial amount of time selling us CryEngine, and for good reason; they want to rival Unity and Unreal with their engine as a large side project. I’m mostly unimpressed, because all the technicality goes over my baby freshman head, and a lot of the neat things shown were repurposed components and work-arounds, which honestly doesn’t really rub me the right way. It’s no doubt a “high performance realistic 3D” game engine, and I think that’s just far too narrow a scope to rival Unity or Unreal. Not to mention they’re still working on the documentation. All that said, it’s got a lot of potential, and I’m at least interested to see if they can rise to match their goals.
With nothing left on the agenda, we headed back to Frankfurt, and after some deliberation, decided on getting ramen for dinner. I was concerned we wouldn’t have enough space for everyone and it’d be a shoddy stall restaurant, but I was more than satisfied with what we ended up at. It was a very nice restaurant, and the food I ordered—shio ramen with three gyoza as an appetizer—was great. I think a hint of spiciness in the ramen really makes it that much better, though. Oh, and I also sort of used chopsticks for the first time. I don’t think I could eat solid food with them, but they’re not bad for eating noodles.
I forgot to take a picture before eating. It looked all nice and orderly when I got it, as restaurant ramen tends to look.
At the restaurant, we decided to hold a Smash Ultimate tournament back at the hotel. I gathered my switch dock and HDMI cable (I knew they’d come in handy!) and headed to the room, and we got started. I did surprisingly well, maybe because Link’s projectiles are really hard to deal with even if the one playing him isn’t very good. I ended up getting third place, but I think that’s very respectable considering I was playing characters I’m not that great at, namely Joker. (I’m not that great at anyone, to be frank, but I’m better at some characters than others.) Sam won the tournament after losing in the very first round and clamoring up through Loser’s Bracket, and after Alex dipped out to help the games go faster and also sleep.
It also probably warrants noting I was using my usual controller, and everyone else was using joycons.
Having gotten an inexplicably decent sleep, I was out and ready to stroll around Frankfurt with little difficulty, at least as far as I remember. That is, except for the fact I had to go back and get my glasses just as the others were leaving. By the time I was back, they were gone; I’d told them to go on without me, but I didn’t expect them to be so far ahead. I walked at a pace substantially quicker than my usual, and never quite caught up to them on the way. That probably wasn’t helped by a couple photo detours.
Once I’d reached their destination, Frankfurt Cathedral, however (which they graciously supplied a link to in the group chat which I could plug into Google Maps), I found them standing around. Apparently, I’d arrived just a couple minutes before the sightseeing was about to start. I’m glad I was on time, because the Cathedral was just as impressive and nice to look at on the inside as the outside.
Looking up the outside of Frankfurt Cathedral.Looking around the inside of the Frankfurt Cathedral.
Look at all the detail on this singular little corner on the outside of the cathedral.
After that, we began to simply walk around Frankfurt, as I took pictures along the way.
The protruding center part is actually another building, behind the white one. What unfortunate placement…
I didn’t realize it as I walked across, but we went across the Eiserner Steg, a bridge famous for it’s staggering amount of love locks. I wouldn’t have recognized it was a famous bridge had a good friend of mine not noted it while I was texting her. While everyone else was getting lunch, I took a detour back down there to look at it again, appreciating it a little more this time.
Take a look at all those locks!
This would normally be enough to wrap up a whole day for me, but we had another event in store for us; a reception with the Mayor of Eltville am Rhein himself, Patrick Kunkel. I only learned of our shared name about two-thirds of the way through said reception.
Before we attended that, however, we had to get there, and once we did, we had plenty of time to spend until the reception. Me, Mike, Stephen, and Volker stopped to get ice cream first due to the sweltering heat, and the rest of the time I spent doing nothing by the river, which beat back the heat significantly with its cool breeze. I drifted here and there, loitering and lounging until I came to settle at a drinks place where everyone else was until it was time (which I did not take any pictures of).
The castle we walked into (yes, a castle) was positively full of flowers, ones I took many, MANY pictures of, but I kept only the best ones. Here they are;
A panorama of the castle interior.
The reception involved a short tour of one of the towers of the castle, from which we had a nice view, plus a few historical exhibitions within that I was too knocked out by heat to care about. I took pictures of the view, but they were through windows and not very remarkable. It was startlingly cool inside, to the point of being downright chilly. I joked the mayor was hoarding all of the cold air for himself.
Looking up inside the top floor of the tower.
A view of the tower from the outside.
Afterwards, a miniscule “meal” of sorts where we were served champagne and pretzels with a special cream cheese to go with them. I did, in fact, take a couple sips of the champagne, but promptly decided it didn’t taste very good and I’d much rather have a couple glasses of water to combat the ever-present heat. The trees and coming dusk helped, at least. I can, however, technically say that my first drink of alcohol was in a big flower garden castle behind closed doors with a mayor that shares my name, overlooking a pretty river.
The place we had the drinks and pretzels, and where the panorama was taken. The tables aren’t shown.
The cream cheese we had with the pretzels.
The champagne I quickly abandoned in favor of water.
Today we took a tour of another game studio: Kalypso, located in Worms. Kalypso itself is not a game development company, although they published the Tropico series developed by Limbic Entertainment. As a marketing/publishing company, Kalypso works mainly with graphic design, such as banner art, box art, as well as quality assurance testing. Our tour guide showed us around the studio, including the quality assurance labs and some of the offices, used by employees who handle finances and marketing. We also talked a little about quality assurance as a job. Contrary to what most people may believe, it can be very challenging and tedious. It involves not just playing games, but carefully examining them and trying to cause bugs to occur, as well as reporting those bugs. Quality assurance engineering/testing is generally the entry-level job for most game design graduates, and is what I hope to land as my first job in the industry, eventually working up to a UI designer/programmer, or gameplay programmer.
After Kalypso, we walked through the Jewish Cemetery.
It is customary in Jewish tradition to leave stones on top of gravestones, as a sign of respect and to show that somebody was there to visit the grave.
This was the second day that we worked on the game jam. My group decided upon Soshi Shinobi, and started development on it. It was originally Alex Wisdom’s pitch. It is a two-player game where each person controls one half of the player. The premise behind the game: “Soshi Shinobi” is that the ninja possesses fire and water elemental powers, that they would assign to either their legs or arms. “Soshi” means “element” in Japanese. One player would pick water, the other would pick fire, and one player would pick control of the arms, or the legs, and the two would work together to control the single ninja; moving them to avoid hazards with the lower body, and using the upper body to shoot fire or water waves to damage enemies. The elemental ability of each player is pre-set at the beginning of the game and cannot be changed afterward, but the players can switch between controls of the legs or the arms, keeping their abilities with them. The player will behave differently and be vulnerable to different obstacles throughout the game. For example, the player can only walk over fire or water floors if their legs have the correct corresponding element, or they will take damage. The same goes with shooting elemental enemies with fire or water waves. The players must cooperate and decide when to switch body parts and use the correct abilities on body parts at the correct times.
Assigned body parts can be changed if both players press “down” on their controllers, but their assigned elemental abilities stay the same.Player one controls water and the arms, player two controls fire and controls the legs.
The player can only walk over fire floors with fire-element legs. Notice the color of his torso and legs.
If the player controlling the arms has a fire element, they can shoot fire waves
Today we took a tour of Nintendo of Germany. Nintendo of Europe was located on the 16th floor of the building, while Nintendo of Germany, which deals with Germany, Sweden, and other nearby countries. Their office was located on the 14th floor, and we were shown a presentation about some of the history of Nintendo, and what Nintendo of Germany does. NoG mainly handles localizing games from Japanese into German, as well as marketing, and public relations.
After the tour, we headed downstairs to the second floor to a “game-museum”-like area, where we played a couple rounds of Super Smash Bros.
Visitor’s Pass. Let’s-a-go!Some gifts we all received after the presentation.I got my very first amiibos at the shop in the same building. The shop is meant only for employees but the employee who gave the presentation was kind enough to pay for some gifts and let us reimburse her.
Later in the afternoon we took a tour of the Crytek Studio. They are a subsidiary of Ubisoft, and are the developers of games such as Far Cry, Crysis, WARFACE, Ryse: Son of Rome, The Climb, and Hunt: Showdown. We were shown a presentation of what students should expect when looking for jobs in the game design industry. After showing us where the employees work on their proprietary engine, CRYENGINE, and work on their games, one of the software engineers showed us the CRYENGINE and how to make a simple trampoline using pre-made objects from the SDK. We also got to try out one of their VR games on Oculus: The Climb.
Afterward, we had dinner at a nice ramen place called Ramen Jun. This was my first time ever having Ramen, and although it was the saltiest thing I had ever eaten in my life, it was pretty tasty.
Miso CheeseSakura martini. It was so good I ended up having two
Sunday marked the 4th and final day of the Game Jam. Presentations for the various games that had been made were not slated to occur until later in the afternoon/evening, so the morning became an “all hands on deck” dash to get everything put together and working as much as possible.
I woke up early on Sunday in order to try and maximize the amount of time I had in order to get everything ready on my end for the enemy AI setup, as I still had at least one more enemy to fully implement, the “Frightened” enemy type. Once I got to my desk to start coding, however, I was informed that the rotational system I had previous implemented was actually something that should be left in for only certain enemy types that needed to be marked as doing that type of behavior (i.e. the spider and the yet to be added mouse enemies). Along with that, I was asked to set up the enemies Unity Scriptable Objects, which was a system I had never used before.
Putting the rotational system back in place was not as much of a challenge as I had originally anticipated, as I was able to grab the code from a previous version thanks to the power of source control. I simply took the old rotational code I had made, cleaned it up a bit, and merged it with my new rotational code and used a Boolean value to determine which rotational code needed to be used to rotate the character.
Using a Boolean value to determine which type of rotation system the NPCs should use was also made easier with the use of Unity Scriptable Objects. While it took me a while to figure out what a Unity Scriptable Object was, and I got a bit confused on how they worked, after being shown how to roughly set them up and use them by a fellow team member I quickly understood their use. I transitioned most of the settings from the original script to the Unity Scriptable Objects code file, and linked the two together such that updating the settings in the Scriptable Object changed the way different NPCs performed. Using this system also allowed the Game Designers to create multiple different NPC types that follow the same general behavior patterns, which became very useful even in my own testing as I created a “SUPER Angry Spider” NPC that I made incredibly fast and powerful in order to test various systems. When I needed to refine pre-existing systems by adding more variables into the mix to alter the way things functioned (such as adding different types of speed the enemies would use depending on what they were doing), adding this in such that it could be understood and editable by an outsider became much easier.
Once the Scriptable Objects had been fully setup the way I needed them to be and the rotational system was fully reimplemented, I began working on finishing up the frightened mouse NPC that I had only barely started working on the day before for 10 minutes at best. I coded the mouse to,as with all NPCs, utilize the wander function to travel within a certain area when there are no players nearby. Beyond that, however, I setup a “FleeFromPlayers” function to accomplish the behavior of having the mouse, as the function title implies, run away from nearby players.
Setting this script up was actually relatively simple once I was able to plan out what I wanted to happen on a pencil and piece of paper. Essentially what happens is the NPC checks the location of nearby players, and when players enter the “aggro zone” that got setup for aggressive NPCs, instead of chasing after them they will instead add them to a list object for nearby players. Once the nearby players are added to the list the method then builds an average direction vector the mouse should travel towards in order to get away from the players by getting the positions of the players in relation to the mouse and turning that into a directional vector. I also made it so that the mouse would use a “Charge Speed” variable I had setup for the aggressive NPCs as the speed at which the mouse runs away from the players. Once this was implemented and functioning properly, I then went into the task of setting up the rotations in the event the mouse was marked as being one that should rotate. This was not entirely that difficult, I only needed to take a step back and go through what the code I had written was doing to find the places I needed to make code changes for flee rotations to work smoothly.
After the mouse was setup, I then went about the task of seeing how it would work in one of the actual levels that had been built as opposed to my own personal test scene that I had setup. One problem I noticed almost immediately was that the mouse was able to easily fly off the map and go through the walls when chased to that point. I then decided to try and find a solution to this, and in order to do this I had to look into the Unity Tilemap system, as it was used to build the level maps. I found that there was a way to get the bounds of the Tilemaps, much like you are able to get the bounds of various colliders. One thing that I did initially get confused by with the new system though was that instead of using Vector 2s and Vector 3s, it insead used Vector Ints, which was a data type I had not previously used. It took a bit of trial and error and digging, but I found out there was a way to convert a Vector2 into a Vector2Int. Once I had gotten that setup, I tried making it so that the mouse would stay within the boundaries of the “Wall” Tilemap that the designers has put in place to keep the players from moving beyond the map. This was moderately successful, as I employed a similar tactic for making sure the other enemies stayed inside their wander zones when not chasing the player, however the mouse would go just beyond the wall so that it was still out of the player’s reach. Initially I thought this would be an issue but then thought it was like the mouse escaping through cracks in the walls, as the setting for this game was in an old dungeon. I discussed it with the other developers and the designers are we decided it was a cool feature, so the players had to be quick and strategic in order to get the mouse.
Once the mouse NPC was completely setup, we decided to merge the branches together to see how everything worked on a singular branch. Initially things were looking good, but then after merging one branch in particular that had many changes to core systems, we realized things were no longer functioning properly. There was a huge miscommunication issue that seemed to crop up in the last couple of hours as a team member tried to redo a lot of systems that had been put in place the night before the final day. Unfortunately, the team member that made many changes to the core mechanics was unable to get everything straightened out in time and get everything working in unison before the end of the game jam, although some things were thankfully able to return to a functional state.
Once the time came for work to finish on all the projects, we went down a few floors for all the teams to present their games. The games that were presented all looked amazing considering the limited amount of time and resources available to work on them. I was particularly impressed by the fact that the “Strike Counter” game was able to get networking setup, and the amount of detail and presentation of the game “Beat the Boss”. While I did not do the presentation for our game, those who were presenting had to restart the game an unfortunate number of times due to bugs that popped up in the last minute due to the breakdown in communication on how the systems worked together. Overall though, they were able to present the game all the way through (without going into any of the enemy AI mechanics due to some of the issues) and we got some great feedback on how the game could potentially be brought over to either Nintendo Switch or Mobile devices.
After the Game Jam presentations were done, we all gathered outside to take a group photo with all those who participated in the Game Jam to go on a wall of fame for the lab. Unfortunately, I was unable to locate a copy of this photo as of yet.
After the Game Jam was over, we headed back to the hotel to rest up for a bit, but then set out to go find dinner. We headed over to a burger restaurant called Road House. I was informed on the way over to the restaurant that there was a triple-patty burger that could be eaten, and felt I had been issued a challenge. Soon after getting there however, I learned that not only was there a triple-patty burger but also a five patty burger, and those who fully ate it were placed on a wall of fame in the restaurant and got a hoodie.
I decided in the end not to order this burger, and instead went with this three patty burger. It quickly turned out that my eyes were bigger than my stomach, as I was not even able to finish the three patty burger, and in the end had to box it up for later. Along with that, I also had the opportunity to try a hot sauce called “100% pain”. Being the brave lad that I am, I decided it would be an excellent idea to dunk an entire french fry in the sauce then immediately put it in my mouth. Within seconds my face felt like it was getting exponentially hotter and tears started forming in my eyes. Luckily a good friend that was with us ran to go get me some milk for instant relief, and I decided it would be in my best interest to not try that sauce again.
After dinner concluded, we decided to go on a trip to get Ice Cream, but learned that all of the nearby Ice Cream places had closed. So, instead of getting a delicious frozen treat, we instead went for a long walk reminiscing about the past week and ended up in a beautiful section of the park in the center of Paderborn where we sat by the river continuing to talk. After spending some time at this park, we then returned to the hotel so we could rest up for our trip to Frankfurt (after a very tearful farewell to those who would not be joining us in Frankfurt).
Game Jam thoughts: Overall, I feel like I performed well in the Game Jam. I learned a lot about different systems present in Unity and how to better code with other people who may not know that much about coding in mind for those who will need to design levels. This particularly came to the front when I learned about using Unity Scriptable Objects. I spent most of my time this Game Jam working on the enemy AI, in addition to discussing with the other coders ways in which they could solve the problems they were having with things such as player controls. I was a bit disappointed that my hard work was not able to be showcased for the presentation, as a core element that enabled player and enemy AI interactions to function properly was altered to the point that the enemies no longer detected the player, no were consumed when the player crashed into them. Along with that, systems that the other developers had made for various things the player was supposed to be able to do were also rendered non-functional, and when I sat down with them to try and get them working we were unsure how we could go about bringing them back up in time as many of the core files for the game had been significantly altered. I did, however, learn a lot about quaternion math in Unity and how to go about programming different enemy AI interactions. I would be very interested in fixing up the project from its current state in the future, and go ahead with building it up more and maybe even move it to console.
We woke up at a reasonable time to get on our train from Paderborn to Frankfurt to start the second half of our trip. Just before heading out, we got the opportunity to buy some breakfast and a snack for the train. After some debating with myself, I decided not to buy any candy for the train, but instead, buy a supplement to the breakfast I had at In Via.
All that shininess on the pastries is sugar icing of some kind, by the way.
The train ride was plenty comfy, and had WiFi, so I spent it writing one of these blog posts. In what felt like no time at all, we were off the first train and waiting for the second. I decided to wander, see if I wanted to buy anything, and look for a bathroom. Find a bathroom I did, but at a price. Literally.
I was thinking to myself, figuratively, that bathrooms are a commodity in these midway train stations, and then I see a toll booth, with more secure doors than I’ve seen than any other toll booth in recent memory. I don’t know if the goal is to get stingy people to resort to desperate measures, or what, but regardless, it was easily the worst bathroom I’ve been in the whole trip. Even in other public bathrooms, the toilet seats were on securely and they didn’t smell bad. It wasn’t unworkable, though. One doesn’t require much to go through the bathroom process.
The next ride in our trip to Frankfurt didn’t have enough seats for all of us, but me and a couple others got by sitting on our suitcases. I played against Alex in Super Smash Brothers Ultimate and got moderately to severely bodied for all but one match, which coincidentally happened to be our last one. I’m not saying he rage-quit, but… (He absolutely did not rage quit. I’m merely obligated to make an overconfident joke about it.)
Frankfurt, like Paderborn, made a terrible first impression. Though we got there very much in time, unlike my arrival to Paderborn, it was hot as all hell, seemed fairly shabby (I would later learn this is only the case for the area near the train station), and vaguely stank of smoke. It was even hotter in the hotel, even in the lobby, and only some lucky customers get a ceiling fan in their room. It’s not even an extra charge. I pity, and worry for those without a window OR ceiling fan.
After the raging thunderstorm that exploded onto the scene almost as soon as we set foot in the hotel, the sky brightened once more, like night turning into day. It was only half past four, but it felt like eight throughout the storm, and the brightness of the sky was frankly a little disorienting. Not disorienting enough, however, to prevent us from going out to dinner.
I’m pretty sure there were intermediate events, but I’ve forgotten them if so. We found a nice place called Salzkammer, which was constantly playing music that sounded uncannily similar to Despacito for the entire time we were there.
The front of the Salzkammer menu.
Here’s Despacito in German. I’m not sorry.
I had a schnitzel, followed by some white chocolate mousse. “Sweet and sour rhubarb” didn’t quite sound like the kind of thing I’d enjoy, but I had faith that it wouldn’t be put in with the strawberry, white chocolate, and vanilla ice cream if it didn’t go well with it, and that faith was well placed. It certainly couldn’t match the strawberries (which I’m beginning to think I should eat more often), but it was no slouch.
Finally, Frankfurt had one more special event planned for me; it introduced me to Frick and the MEAT ROOM. I did not enter either of these stores(?), and do not plan to change that, because I fear the consequences.
And so, my first night at Frankfurt came to a close. The stupid levels of heat were thankfully beaten back a little by a fan graciously given to me by the front desk, and allowed me to sleep fairly well. All’s well that ends well?
