Erfurt/Frankfurt

Oktoberfest round two! We hit Erfurt and did a bit of a tour around the town- another large German village built on a river that has the standard deck of cards: a few churches, a river, a castle and some cobblestoned streets and piazzas. Well, that was until we came across the old Domplatz and saw the Erfurter Oktoberfest banner and all the people. We went for a bit of a hike around the ground to check it out- The highlight of the sideshow alley was a huge log ride rollercoaster that ended in an enormous downhill run that slams into a huge pool of water and splashes everyone in the boat. I think this bloke was going to be eating cardboard for dinner again because at the crisp 6 degrees it was most of the day, theres no amount of cold beer that would tempt anyone near that thing.

Back at the hostel we had dinner in the common room and booked some well overdue tickets- Train to prague, accommodation in berlin and prague and a bunch of other things. There were a couple of american chicks there we started talking to that were pretty much doing the same rtour as us, but on a tighter budget. As one of the chicks kept going back to a cupboard stealing someones corn flakes for her dinner she told us how they live on 10 EUR accommodation and 5 EUR food a day. I forgot what it was like to be a student! I spared a thought for them as we looked through the cocktail list in a nicely renovated 600 year old bakery built over the local river.

Erfurt has been a pretty cool stay- as soon as we rocked into town I smelt a familiar smell- burning rubber! Quick as a flash the window was down and I could hear the sweet sound of a roaring V8 in the distance. I drove over to where it was coming from and inside a local supermarket car park saw a crane holding a car in the air with flags hanging off it, so went to see what it was about- Enter the "Super Mega XXL Trucks". We didnt have tickets so just watched the festivities over the fence for a bit, and it was pretty cool. Monster trucks, BMW stunt drivers that spent more time on 2 wheels than on the ground, MX bikes doing stunts... It was like an upgrade of the Crusties. The monster trucks were funny to see- the conversions looked like pretty quick and nasty jobs- one was missing a drivers side floor pan to get the steering wheel linkages to the right angles, and they had no sway bars- just standard suspension travel with enormous leaf packs to control the unsprung weight of the tractor tyres- It would have been as comfortable as driving an airborne brick... or a 1984 Landcruiser troop carrier.

After Erfurt we changed seats in the car and I tried my hand at navigating and Lyn tried the driving- Its was pretty big challenge. Im still not sure how you navigate through a city of one way roads and cobblestones with a map that only shows your town as a pin-dot, but we managed. Outside of Erfurt we hit a town bumsberg for lunch- after finding the cobblestoned main piazza and having a feed in the first patch of sun for a few days we set off for Dresden.

The day before was a trip to Frankfurt which turned out pretty well. We sayed in the equivalent of the West Perth CBD- everything vacated at about 7pm and it became a ghost town. After trekking around town given yet another bum steer, this time by the lonely planet telling us a pedestrian bridge over the river dividing town in half was trafficable by a car, then roadworks shutting down half the city into one-way streets, we started looking for our still unbooked hostel. We gave up on the non-existent lonely planet place and found our own- apparently we were pretty lucky coz the whole town seemed to be booked out with the 2 conventions going on then. We headed out onto the town to see the night life and test the local happy hours and crashed out a little after. The next day we checked out the Jewish museum and got a bit of history on the holocaust and the history of Jewish settlement in the town- Pretty rough stuff. The jews were pretty much society's scapegoat for everything from the plague, high taxes and social problems to foreign debt and trade embargos. It seemed they were either burned, chased or thrown out of town every 200 years, but they kept coming back with new determination. During the holocaust, 10,000 jews of Frankfurt were Killed or commited suicide in desperation, but again they came back after to rebuild and try again.

On the way out of Frankfurt I saw a bunch of market stalls setup and headed in for a closer look. Bad move- it turned out to be the "Run for a cure" fun run and the entire city became a race track of pink- we got trapped pretty bad on a bridge and took ages to get back to the car but it was all pretty cool.