We took off from cold rainy Keflavik early Tuesday morning and flew for three-hours-plus over the boggy farmlands of northern Europe, and then into hot sunny Frankfurt airport, which is the biggest airport I ever saw, by far. Unbelievably huge.
I took the shuttle to the light rail and then into the old town, called my Airbnb host Sebastian on my Mobal Euro-pay-as-you-go phone, and found the lodging at its address, Behind The Pretty View 13. That's the address. I assume the street is called Behind The Pretty View because it is lined with the back of the buildings that are on The Pretty View Street, which runs along the River Main on the east part of downtown. I attach a picture of the street sign in case you don't believe me.
It's probably an old building that The Greatest Generation bombed out during The Big One, but it's been gutted and re-done in a bizarre way. It's all clean and spiffy but the toilet room and shower room are on the ground floor and a kitchen, fitness room, and 2 bedrooms are upstairs. The main entrance is in a busy loud courtyard full of little vans and construction vehicles. But it's RIGHT DOWNTOWN so who cares. I think Sebastian works from here on his computer in a little office/bedroom downstairs.
I hadn't hardly slept on either flight but I wanted to stay up till local bed time, and I was a little buzzed, so I decided to check out a barber shop I had read about -- Torreto's. Extremely cool. Read about it here and here.
Tuesday is a walk-in day there so I walked up from Behind The Pretty View to where they have an electric barberpole turning in front of their shop.
The barber chairs are big old American ones, and there are oily old wooden shelves and drawers lining the back, and light fixtures with old tied-together tennis shoes thrown over them, and the walls are lined with hundreds of barber-related pictures and sayings. One of my favorites had a picture of a beard with the caption "I have a beard and I am good with the sex."
The main rule there is, No Girls Allowed, and you're not allowed to use the word "Friseur," the normal German word for barber, or you have to pay a €5 fine. You have to say "Barber."
There were four barbers working, all of them with great big beards. And there were six guys waiting for hair and beard cuts, and all but one of them had beards. I walked in and Alex greeted me and asked if I wanted a haircut and a beard trim, and I said yes both, so he said alles gut and pointed to one of the rump-sprung mis-matched upholstered chairs, next to the pile of German automotive magazines spilling out of an old suitcase on a dresser, but first he told me to run up to the bar on the balcony overlooking the place, and get me a beer, which I did (for free, a Mythos, from Greece).
All the dudes were sitting around smoking and drinking beer and whiskey and talking incomprehensible (to me) Hessian German. It was the most dudical place I've been in since the navy. It wasn't gay at all, either, if that's what you're thinking. Slade's son says that these are Greek-German hipsters, and he may be right, but Slade says that just because you're a hipster, that doesn't mean you're not a nice person.
All of the barbers were taking about 5 or 6 times as long (no exaggeration) for each haircut as American barbers do, little snips and clips here and there, using every barber tool and trick you can imagine. And in between customers each barber would apologize to the customer whose turn it was, and sit down on a rump-sprung upholstered chair and have a cigarette and a drink.
When it was finally my turn, skinny little Alexis, aka "Slim," who had a big red beard, took me in his chair and asked "Ich mach's? (Should *I* do it)?" Meaning should I just let him cut it the way he wanted. I said yes, I wanted to rely on is technical expertise (Ich ziehe vor, mich auf deinem Fachkenntnis zu verlassen - That's how I talk, because I get my German from newspapers). But then as an afterthought, I told him to try to make me look like "a mature, successful German businessman" (ein reifer, erfolgreicher deutscher Geschäftsmann). Which he thought mildly amusing, and he shared it with Alex.
I told them I had read that one of them was Greek, and he said ALL of them were Greeks, so we chatted a lot in Greek, and I was kind of surprised (and also kind of sort of disappointed considering the time I've spent on German) to find that I can carry on a conversation in Greek a LOT easier than I can in German.
Well, it turns out that he thought my hair should be pretty short on the sides and pretty long on the top, which is kind of the opposite of what I've always done since about 10th grade. And I think he was right, which is nice to finally know when you're 73 years old I guess.
When he was done, after many, many, many adjustments and touch-ups, and shaving of the neck and ear margins and edges and trimming the beard and mustache, and gelling the hair with proprietary lubricants and spraying the neck with one of those old-fashioned spray bottles with a squeeze bulb attached to a long hose, he put two tiny drops on his finger from a tiny old bottle with its label coming loose and rubbed it on his fingertips, and then he rubbed it all through my beard. I asked him what it was and he said it was "Italian beard oil, very expensive." ANOTHER consumer product I didn't know I needed till I was an old man!!
It cost €41 plus tip - awful expensive but considering it was a very enjoyable lifetime experience, plus I really like the outcome, I don't give a shit. That's what travel adventures are all about. Also, it will make me look different for the rest of my life.
Wednesday, my feet had gotten sore from walking (and the toe infection is still there), so I walked into touristic Frankfurt and to the historical museum (which sucks in numerous ways), and then rested back at the lodging to update the blog, drinking Binding Römer Pils ("das Frankfurter original!" - not too bad) that I bought at the Konstablerwache underground tube station shopping center. Frankfurt's touristic platz is total Disneyland kitsch but you can get fantastic cappuccino slurpies there!
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| Chinese tourists taking pictures among phony restored "medieval" facades |
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