Grown

It's not often that a town manages to build an entirely new Old Town in the ten years between visits, but Frankfurt has managed it. 

When I was last here, in 2010, I have to admit that I did not particularly like the city, It felt too much like a dull business hub, with little history or life. This probably wasn't helped by the fact that almost all the museums were closed for off-season renovations. As I was planning this trip, the best timing-price balance for flights brought me into Frankfurt. So I found an excellent deal on a nice hotel, and planned a few days to recover from the travel and ease into holiday mode. After all, it was a repeat visit, and there wasn't a heap to see, so I would be allowed to laze around as I needed.

I'd love to tell you this is a tale of redemption. That Frankfurt is now at the top of my favourite cities list. That I was wrong. That the city is misunderstood.

Reader, it is not that tale.

But it is not all bad.

For the first day, I thought I was going mad. I *knew* I'd seen some archaeological ruins of the Roman settlement on the site back in 2010, but they ... were ... nowhere to be ... seen. Turns out since then, the city has rebuilt a huge amount of the Old Town that was flattened during World War Two, and built a visitor centre around the ruins. 

I have mixed views about restorations and reconstructions - yes, we want to preserve our built heritage, but there is also something quite fascinating about the process of degradation. When a building has been completely pulverised, then rebuilt as an approximation of the original, I am uncomfortable with people telling me that this is *the* house where so-and-so did something. The house where that happened, where labour's screams echoed, where the writer's ink splattered, where a child's toys were lost to the crevices, that is not the same house. The tangible connection with history has, for me, also gone. That's not to say I don't understand, I do, and wandering through the New Old Town was remarkable in its own way. It is a testament to the power of a city's heritage - millions have been spent to rebuild a history, to return a story to the city, to heal from the varying damages of a world war.

And so, Frankfurt. Still too big, too crowded, searching for an identity. But it's a different place to the one I visited ten years ago, so maybe in another decade it will have found its feet and take a place on my list of favs.