Frankfurt

After Ryan initially informed me that we would be moving yet again, I referred to our future home as "$!@#furt." But in my continual attempts to impersonate a mature adult I have been trying to focus on the positive aspects of our future hometown.

Since Easter Friday and Easter Monday are holidays in Germany, we decided to take a few days to check out the Frankfurt area and scout out a potential new neighborhood. We've developed a method for housing selection:




Step one: find out which neighborhoods are neither dirty and sketchy nor snobby and pretentious.

Step two: see which neighborhoods are closest to the public transit for Ryan's commute

Step three: in this neighborhood which apartments are near a grocery store?

Step four: choose from this set an apartment semi-randomly depending on how much time we have before moving day.

Its amazing really that we agree as much as we do on what makes a good neighborhood. Maybe after all our moving about we just have a feel for it? We spent the weekend navigating Frankfurt's ridiculously complicated mass transit system (Berlin by far has the best mass-trans in Germany) and saw 4 suburbs and 2 neighborhoods in Frankfurt.

Two neighborhoods have most successfully passed step one, Bornheim (left photo, in Frankfurt) and Seligenstadt (right photo, tiny village southeast where Ryan's company will relocate). In Frankfurt life would continue on much like life in Berlin, connection the the expat community and big city life. Seligentstadt would be closer for Ryan's commute, but far from English movie theatres, churches, and etc. But when we visited Seligenstadt there was a wonderful market and during a routine pre-lunch wine tasting (one upshot of Frankfurt!) we were approached by some lovely locals to join their table and spent the better part of an hour talking with them. This has never happened to us in the big cities before, and might be worth giving small town life a second look. So for now the debate continues...