Eurotrip Day 9 - Frankfurt

(Part 9 of a series.)

A few days before, I posted an Instagram story that tagged Frankfurt as my location. My friend Jackie messaged me with a little bit of tampo (i.e., sulking, but it's a bit more complex) because I didn't tell her that I was going to Frankfurt and that I forgot that she is in Frankfurt. In all honesty, I know that she is in Germany. I just didn't know that Jackie is specifically in Frankfurt. When we were able to settle the tampo, I told Jackie that we will be going back to Frankfurt on day 9 as our exit city for the tour, and that day would be a free day.

Quick tour of Frankfurt
Since it was quite early when we arrived in Frankfurt, we just dropped off our bags then the rest of the day was free.

We met some of our tour companions in the train station. They wanted to explore the city, too. They'll use their Google maps to do so. We told them we're going to do the same thing with Jackie, and they asked if they could come with us. (There's six of them. A family of four, and two solo travelers.) Jackie was fine with it, and even offered to bring us anywhere we wanted to. She acted as our tour guide.

We revisited Frankfurt Am Main, but this time Jackie brought us to the statues and monuments we weren't able to visit during our first day.

We did a little sightseeing and the group requested to eat familiar food, and Jackie had this favorite Thai restaurant. This is when Jackie told me about the "Best Tip". (See: Day 6)

Every staff in that restaurant was Thai. No kidding.

We passed through the bridge where locals celebrate the new year. It was an amazing feat of German engineering.Jackie was telling the new year party story when the bridge was full of people and the bridge was wobbly and shaky and Germans were so confident about the bridge's build that they didn't care whether it was shaking. They know the bridge will be fine because they built it.

Our last stop was the giant Euro sign in the city center.

It was a fun spontaneous tour.

Side story:
For tours where we have to bring large winter clothes, DK and I bring these vacuum packing bags paired with a vacuum pump. This method saves us a lot of space, and I always manage to only use 60% of my suitcase everytime. I was looking for the vacuum pump on this night but for some reason we can't find it. I remember using it on Vienna (day 6), but we were too busy between then and this night and we didn't need to pump, that we actually forgot to check where it is. We concluded that we didn't get to pack somewhere between Vienna and Zurich.

So what did we do? Manual. I was telling DK like, "I don't know about you, but I'm gonna suck the air from these bags." At first she was laughing at me, but later realized that in the absence of the pump, we had to make do. We were successful.

After that, we agreed that we will bring two vacuum pumps every trip, sort of a backup.
End of side story

We ended up walking like 30,000 steps or more for the entire day. The places we went to for the tour were generally safe. We took the train back to the hotel and prepared for the homebound trip.

--Raisondetroy