Falling down the Rabit Hole...

Nearly every day that I am here I have the distinct sense that I am Alice. Somewhere along the way I slipped, tripped, or took a wrong turn and now much to my dismay I have fallen down the rabbit hole into a surreal world where nothing but sheer madness is rushing on around me. Though my wonderland lacks Cheshire cats and Queens of hearts, every day is like waking up in a circus.
The most commonly found and most troublesome rabbit holes are those at the various U-Bahn (subway) stops. They are multi-layer underground labyrinths of sounds, smells, and utter pandemonium. Aside from nauseating smell of rubber, fuel, and thousands of people too close together; the U-Bahn stations are dreary mind numbing mazes of escalators, platforms, shops, street performers, and baby carnages. Making matters worse, though, is the way in which each of the many sections of the stations connect. From what I understand each of these large stations is a designed like a series of spiders stacks on top of each other – one central body with many bending legs of hallways, exits, and platforms, growing our from all sides. So often I read a sign (if I can see it) go down a level come, back up an emerge in whole new word. Heartache is one of the largest stops in the city and the one through which I have to travel to get anywhere. Not only does ever U-Bahn in the city go through, but every S-Bahn does as well. Thus creating three layers of absolute madness, one layer for U-Bhans, one for S-Bahns, and one for the seedy underground labyrinth of shops and venders. Each of these levels and the street above are connected by a countless number of escalators and staircases. The problem is, however, none of them take you where you expect to go. Just when I think I have things figured out, I try a new exit to the street and wind up in a part of the it I’ve never seen. Some platforms have two exits to the upper level, but only one entrance down to them. Stairwells and escalators are randomly scattered across the platforms with absolutely no rhyme or reason to their placement. So often I have descended to platform labeled with the train I need, only to discover I am on the platform going the wrong direction. So I head back up the stairs walk several hundred yards in a direction that seems it would lead me to the opposite platform, and run down the stairs only to discover I have ended up exactly where I started. In the most heavily trafficked area of the station there are 3 platforms and six tracks. It is still an utter mystery how one gets to the middle platform. I pray daily that I will never need a train leaving from there because I think I will simply have to jump the tracks from below, because I am convinced there is no stairwell leading to it.

Many harrowing rabbit holes of the public transpiration system, the city its self if is full of them as well. One moment I am walking a long, enjoying a the present sunny day on a crowded but relatively normal city street, and then I turn a corner or enter a shop and I’ve landed in a dream world. Every single day Zeil (the main downtown shipping street of Frankfurt) explodes with new venders, stalls, performers, baggers, evangelists, salespeople. Given this, I am convinced that I have taken up residence in a circus. Today I went to the city to buy some shoes and was greeted with several men on stilts one of whom was riding a bike and showing as part of a promotional display for the city transpiration system. I then found that some sort of transient market had set itself up in the middle of the streets, making the fussgangerzone nearly impassible. Men with Turkish accent yelled fruit prices from stands, Gypsies played music in the streets, and angry crazy Germans whished by on bicycles. Sometimes its all just too much and I have to sit down and just watch it all go by for a while. It is no wonder the Germans find absolutely necessary to vacation at beaches, in the forests, and on mountains – if they didn’t the visual, olfactory, and auditory stimulation of their daily lives would push them into madness.
I do not know why people choose to live like this. Give me the corn fields and cow shit aroma of Nebraska any day, instead of this madness.