I arrived in Frankfurt with my father (link) had dinner at his hotel, and then took a taxi back into town to join AIESEC's national planning conference. 300 people from AIESEC in Germany come together for a week to outline the goals and strategies fort he year, but I won't get into that. As a city , Frankfurt is unlike any other I've visited in Germany so far, it really has a big city feel without being entirely overwhelming like Berlin. Frankfurt isn�t concerned with being the capital, growing at a ridiculous pace, or any of that, it's too busy. There are banks everywhere and the streets are packed with busy people from all over Europe. It has been a bit of a hobby amongst all of us here to show off any Euro coins that we get that aren't German, and I haven't seen that many, a couple of Dutch ones, 1 or 2 from France and Spain, but they're mostly all German. Frankfurt is different. When we got our change back from dinner at a restaurant downtown, nearly every coin was from somewhere else. No less than nine countries were represented at our table. Frankfurt is very international with 20 percent of its population speaking German as a second language or not at all.
Dinner was good, we tried to have some local food, including such Frankfurt classics as Handk�se mit musik (directly translated hand cheese with music) which is actually meat. Then there is the famous "green sauce" and apple wine.
The buildings in the financial district our Frankfurt�s real distinguishing feature, and what better way to see them than lit up at night from a boat? That's what the organizing committee of the conference thought and they organized our official dinner on a ship that runs up and down the Main river that streams its way right through the heart of Frankfurt. It was a great way to see the lights and towers.
