The next instalment in The Year of the City Break was another weekend trip to Frankfurt, which I last wrote about here.
Being seasoned Frankfurters by now, we skipped the tourist sights and headed straight out for drinks. I arrived just in time to catch the last day of Opernplatzfest, the Opera Square Festival, a sprawl of buzzing food and drink stalls outside the beautiful Alte Oper, the old opera house.
Now that he's had a few months to settle in, Boyfriend has firmly decided on a favourite bar. Bar ohne Namen ("The Bar with No Name") is a tiny hole-in-the-wall which comes alive on hot summer evenings, when hordes of people spill out into the street clutching enormous gin and tonics and Aperol spritzes.
Frankfurt's Kleinmarkthalle is a bustling indoor market, a foodie's dream. On Saturday lunchtime we munched and sampled our way through the Moroccan, Turkish, German and Italian market stalls, before settling down to a glass of wine and some lunch on the sun deck.
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On Saturday night we skipped down to Walon & Rosetti, a hipster Italian restaurant, where we shared seriously salty lamb chops and melting tagliata steak, before spilling out into the street to join the crowds making the most of the summer heat.
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Just around the corner, nestled in the middle of the red light district, is "the off-licence" - not quite a bar, not quite an off-licence, where you can buy a beer or a can of whiskey and coke, pull up a plastic chair and hang out with the shop's resident DJ. With July temperatures up in the thirties, it was heaving.
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The next morning we were feeling somewhat delicate. Boyfriend's apartment is just around the corner from Frankfurt's Botanical Gardens, the Palmengarten. It's a beautiful place for a stroll, and even has a sprawl of sunloungers set out on the grass if you're feeling lazy.
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Being too scorching a day to explore the greenhouses, we made for the boating lake. Surrounded by willow trees, it's full of enormous carp, busy ducks and serenely floating swans.
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| Making it look easy. |
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And who said Frankfurt was just a financial centre?
