A little Appeteaser of Adventure: ZOMBIES!

Well, well, well... thought you'd never hear from me again, did you? Thought that I might succeed in getting myself imprisoned on some minor offense in an obscure region that doesn't appear on google maps? Convinced I might end up eaten by a Great White at the bottom of the world? Believed that I would never leave the fruit groves? Well, you were mistaken. This Time. I still have plenty of life to live.

The last time you heard from me, I was making my way from Poznan towards Croatia, or Hrvatska as they say it, for some mad couchsurfing and spectacular shepherding. Now, I am back in the states, back in school, and back in the same dorm, the same room, same RA, and living with the same roommate. It's like everything around me is shifiting in a constant state of flux, but a small bubble floats from my frame, eternally preserving what works. Thinking back, I could not have possibly predicted the meanderings that my 4 or so weeks on my own forced me to take, and I've told the stories (Though only a few of them; my faithful readers will be treated to much more revealing versions) to many who felt that they would have been unblievable if told by anyone else. Even I don't quite believe all of the things that happened, but, in the words of someone I came across while reading Neil Gaiman, "Always trust the story, never the storyteller."

I think the way I'll handle this is to publish small bits of my adventure, both the ups and the downs, at intermittent intervals in order to keep you all wanting more (and possibly buying my book; you know, the one I'm going to write). I'll start with Germany.

I only spent two days in the land of Wienersnichzel (I have no idea how to spell that), but Frankfurt was so chill and pleasant, for the most part, that even with all the crap that befell my stay, I wish I could have stayed there longer. I parted from JP and Jonathan in the airport after some complex manuvering to get all of Jonathan's weighty baggage home (a move that resulted in them missing their flights) and proceeded to use the S Bhan with a syste of guess and check. Granted, it wasn't very hard to deduce where I was going to; I'm good at figuring out stuff like that and I love the band Rammstein, so I wasn't completely thrown by the Greman language. The advert for the hostel I was staying at mentioned that the location was culturally interesting, but stepping out of the station with a gigantic backpack and finding myself smack in the middle of Frankfurt's red light district was a bit disconcerting. It took me a while to find the street in question and even longer to convince the Russian bouncers that I wasn't interested in a lap dance, but I found my way to the best hostel I think I've ever stayed in. Wish I remembered the name, but I wouldn't really reccommend it simply due to the nature of the surrounding alleyways.

After unpacking, I stepped through the front door of my hostel with the plan to walk along the wide river with some pleasant mood music. I walked right into a hoarde of zombies. A parade of the undead was filing slowly through the streets of Frankfurt, drawing with them a string of tourists with their cameras, wildly snapping photos. Every once in a while, one of the zombies would savage one of them, and the rest would all run excitedly to capture the photo op. At one point, a small group of dead females attempted to "rough me up", but I managed to escape with my life and wallet intact.

I stuck with the parade for a while and split off at the mall to explore, but really, a mall in Germany is just like a mall in the US; just more tourist crap with "Germany" and "Bier" featured prominently. I left the establishment to try to find grocery store to get some eats, but they were few and far between in that part of town. Stumbing into a theatre, I ended up purchasing a ticket for Harry Potter und der Halb Blut Prinz, which I was only able to follow because I had the name of the incantations and potions memorized from my extensive listening to the books on CD, as read by that most magical of vocalist actors, Jim Dale. I retired to my room around 1:00, and you can imagine what I faced trying to get through the local "shops" to my hostel. I was quite pleased to be in a bed that night.

The next day was fairly uneventful. Actually, a very scary thing happened, but I am going to leave that out. Maybe one day. But for the most part, I did what I thought I was going to do earlier, and took a long walk by the riverside. Frankfurt really is a beautiful city, and my Dad tells me that it pales in comparison with the rest of the country. The people are friendly, there are plenty of open air theatres showing alien movies from the 60s, the dark bread is thick and cheap, I assume the bier is good (I didn't actually have any beer in Germany! What a jest!), the smells and sounds of juicy, stomach-vicing saussage pervades the air, and the Chinese resturants are open until 12:00.

I love Ryanair for the prices; I flew for 20 euro, or something like that. But the locations of their airports leave much to be desired. I took a 6:00 bus to the airport that is not actually in Frankfurt, but 2 hours away in a small town famous for it's proximity to something toxic. I really did get what I paid for.

But at least I made it on the plane, and that is where I leave you for now, salivating to hear what happened once I touched down in Zadar, in one of the few airports in the world that actually uses the highway as a taxi surface for the planes. By the way, I really appreciate everyone reading this. It gives me a sense of fulfillment that my chronicles are passing through more than just my own head. Cheers.