Mitfahrgelegenheiten, Beach Parties and old friends
Over the last three weeks, I have spent quite a lot of time in Frankfurt, going there twice. I was finally fed up with paying insane amounts of money to travel in a relaxed way by train (and die Bahn now even wants me to pay the full price for my BahnCard) or a bit cheaper by car, so I decided to go for a Mitfahrgelegenheit. The I chose suits me pretty well, you can look up who drives when (usually about six to ten people per day for the Frankfurt<->Munich route) and just phone them up spontaneously. I never figured out which train to take more than two hours in advance, so I thought using Mitfahrgelegenheiten was out of the question for somebody as badly planning ahead as myself, but everything really worked pretty well. On the first trip to Frankfurt, I had the pleasure of being the company of two blondes in a convertible. Actually, driving through Munich in a convertible really gives you a different perspective. Usually, I rather concentrate on the street ahead of me, so I was really impressed how many beautiful buildings there are. Well, as soon as we got out of Munich the trouble started (it was Friday afternoon) and it took us about five hours to get to Frankfurt. Towards the end, the ladies (they were somewhere in their 30s I guess) got a bit nervous and started phoning around what to wear for the beach party they wanted to attend later on and then decided to just change their outfit in the car after dropping me at the Autobahn-exit.

Later that weekend, I went to those beach parties twice as well, together with Anna, Tobi, Patricia, Tina and Martin (one of Tina's and Patricia's colleagues). It was pretty relaxing there, though the drinks were insanely expensive (5.50 € for a wheat beer) and the music was a bit too housy for my taste. Still it pretty rocked, so we came back the next day when even the music was cool.

Other things I did during that stay was bringing my parents to the airport at 6:30 in the morning. For some reason, I thought it be perfectly adequate to just stay up until then, which of course turned out to be a stupid idea and killed most of the following day. On one day, we had a nice barbecue on our terrace, which included reasonable amounts of Bacardi-Coke, beer and the rest of the alcopop stock I still had left from my birthday party.

The other time I went back to Frankfurt was mostly because Sven was around and life was getting pretty dull in Munich with most people (well, Bene and Andrea at least) away and Ulrich and Luxi working a lot. This time, I drove to Frankfurt with an older guy in his 50s, which went pretty smooth (driving on Wednesday evening as opposed to Friday afternoon also helps a lot). The first evening, Tina and Tobi came around, and Tobi related us the story of Frank's wedding he, Marco, Oli, Sven and Louise went to the previous weekend over a bottle of red wine. The next day, we had a big meet-up in the center of Frankfurt with Sven and Louise, where Marco, Oli, Tobi and Tina also showed up. It was extremely nice meeting Sven again, and I also had a more-than-usual chatter with Louise, sitting next to her. Last Sunday, I met up with Taka and Tobi and went to the local ice cream parlor we used to go to when we were teens. We stayed there for a couple of hours having a good time and then bumped into Tobi's ex-girlfriend Filiz on the way out, which turned out to be a nice event. I finally went back to Munich on Tuesday evening, this time sharing the car with four others (at least until Nuremberg, where one of the guys got off), which was pretty awkward.

Probably the nicest thing about going back to Frankfurt was meeting up with old friends from school. Usually, I meet Tobi, Marco and Oli (and sometimes Taka or even Sven), but this time I met a couple of people I did not have contact with in years. During my first stay I got bored and decided to finally call up Jule. Jule was the first female best-friend I had back in the last year of school, and we had a lot of fun going out to clubs together with Nicole and chatting during school and over the phone. However, we pretty much lost contact after school, not least because I was getting tired of always calling her. She always seemed pretty pleased that I called, but never really called me. Well, after figuring out that she still owns the same mobile number as eigth years ago, I catched her during a meeting. Quite surprisingly, she really called me back later that day and we talked for over an hour I think, which was extremely pleasant. These days, she works at Saatchi&Saatchi and seems pretty successful at it. We also took a while to get her characterization from the school journal off google. During the other trip, I went to the local supermarket and met Thomas Siebert. He's now a physiotherapist (he used to be a body-builder and jiu-jitsu master before) and talked a while about how we should get our act together and organize a great reunion. The supermarket was about to close though, so we could not talk for a long time. The other day, I went to the deutsche Bibliothek and met Tobi and Marco (well, not so surprising). However, we also met Meriem, who I haven't seen since the end of school I think. We were not exactly close friends back then, but contrary to Tobi and Oli, I always thought she was nice and we got along together pretty well. She is now working at the department of pedagogics doing a Ph.D. there. We talked a long while about the old times and what has happened to the others since then. All in all, she seemed to be quite well off and did not change a lot.