The Great Adventure back home : Prologue & Episode 1

I know that i should have wrote this entry almost 2 months ago, but due to some issues regarding re-integration and stuff, i didnt. It has been resolved though, but lets just leave that story for another day.

I left you guys with my entry about my trip to Luxembourg. Actually all was not going according to plan but thats history and time to move on...

fast forward a few weeks......

I discussed with my manager to leave the company and end the traineeship a week earlier so that i can go traveling. I have already planned a trip to the UK and have bloody sacrificed a lot to get the ticket there. I had also planned my trip in advance so that my travel plans are in conjunction with the Frankfurt Auto Show , one of the worlds biggest auto show.

Before i go further, its probobly best to inform you that the trip to London was the most successful, exciting and adventurous trip i have done in my whole life where everything went wrong in the beginning but i managed to pull it off. In fact, it was the best thing i have been able to pull of so far. Here's the story.

Well, the plan was to go to the Frankfurt Auto Show on Saturday, 22nd of September and later on the night of the same day fly to London on my Lufthansa flight. My brother has a friend working in London who agreed to accommodate me during my stay in London, so it seemed like a perfect plan. Mind you, I had booked my flight a month in advance in the German spirit of "planning in advance" and changing the flight time or date is as bad as buying a new ticket, but, oh well, i have planed the trip in advance, what could possibly go wrong? Beeeep...I was sooooo wrong!!!!

I think the biggest flaw in my plan was i planned according to the best case scenario. I booked a night flight to London since i didnt want to waste my precious daytime on a plane instead of traveling around. I also expected my brothers friend to be guiding me through London Heathrow (if not picking me up himself), but i soon found out that my expectations had betrayed me big time! About one week before going, my brothers friend emailed me saying that he will not be in town on the weekend that i was supposed to be going to London on...including Monday of the following week. Danggggg! that was a big blow to the head. And London is also not a cheap place to stay at. This new development meant that i had to find a place to stay for saturday night, Sunday night and monday night before my brothers friend will be back in London . And mind you this was the Ramadhan month (i was fasting).

However, he did give me the suggestion of booking a place at the Malaysian Hall in London which i did via its website (on which later i found out that the booking sytem was not functional). The Malaysian Hall houses the Malaysian High Commission and the Malaysian Student Department. It has room in which MALAYSIANs can stay for a relatively super cheap rate, with Malaysian STUDENTs given the priority when it comes to room booking. But, I soon came across a scary announcement which read "Tempahan bilik bagi bulan September dibekukan untuk memberi ruang kepada kemasukan pelajar baru", which basically means, there will be new Malaysian students coming to start their studies and meanwhile they will be staying in the Malaysian Hall, so nobody else can book the rooms. Yet i booked it online anyway, who knows i will get lucky. But rationally it wont be safe just to depend on luck so i dedicated the last few days to find the cheapest hostel in London apart from making my travel plans in London.

Well, not everything went bad. Something rather unexpected happened. A good thing. On the final day of my traineeship, i was told that i am given a special bonus of 1000euros. Surely that was a pleasant surprise. so on top of my normal salary, i will be getting 1000euros extra (but one third of it will be lost due to taxes)..Yahooo! this means gifts for ppl back home, which i didnt planned for in the beginning. But i wouldn't be too excited coz i still have debt to pay when i get back to Malaysia, but that is also another story for another day.

So, very soon the day for me to depart came. I had great parties and outings leading to that final day, so i was pretty sad to leave all the place. Mannheim is a very cool town, not to small, not too big, just nice and i had made good friends with the people there, including the Malaysian students there. I felt reluctant to go but everything good comes to an end i guess.

The final day was spend with packing up and cleaning my room (which i fail miserably). I was supposed to clean it the night before but was too busy partying.. :-P But that was not the only thing i didnt do. In the midst of a busy day cleaning my room before returning the keys to the house master, I forgot to do 1 important thing : I didnt print out the plans i had done so carefully, in which i only remembered before boarding the train to Frankfurt. This also means traveling with the absence of London maps and also means not knowing how on earth i should get to the Malaysian Hall. So much for planning in advance.

Well i didnt want that to ruin my mood for the Frankfurt auto show, which i enjoyed a lot. The thing about exhibitions in Germany, be it car exhibitions or even fashion exhibitions, the quality and quantity of the exhibition is always worth the money you have payed...unlike some countries in the world which offer peanuts for the price of Ferraro Roche. Im sure you know some examples.

The exhibition centre was GIGANTIC! As a comparison, imagine KLIA was the venue , and all the hangars were the individual exhibition halls. It was that big....only maybe all the halls were closer together. The theme for the exhibition was an eco-friendly one, where most of the cars on display had listed their carbon emissions per KM. Yest when it comes to sports cars, this aspect was almost forgotten..hehe

The event was so big, that some transformers decided to join in

One of the technologically advanced concept cars

The new Subaru Imprezza WRX - one of the most awaited cars of the year.

A good thing about The Frankfurt Auto Show was the minimum number of female models, as compared to , say, the KL Motor Show where there were more attractive girls as compared to attractive cars, which I find ridiculous. True men will come to motor shows to see the cars not the girls.

This picture shows exactly how big the event is. Mind you this is only Mercedes presentation hall and its only showing half of the hall. And look at how many people there are! You can easily loose sight of your children here if your not careful.

In short, the event was well worth the 15euros spent to enter. Although completely warn out after the event, i was happy to have conquered the whole venue even during the fasting month. hehehe.

OK....moving on....

Since i have finish touring the event a bit early i spent some time around Frankfurt to see the city and to kill time, since my flight was at 9.30pm. Sadly my camera battery had betrayed me a few hours ago at the end of the Auto Show, so i could not take pictures of the place. But its OK since i think Frankfurt is too urban to be interesting. Frankfurt is the Financial capital of Germany, so all you can see is skyscrapers, banks and financial institutions. There are not many skyscrapers anyway. But there is something ....... "interesting" about Frankfurt. Before i went to Germany i had some good advice from my uncle who is a chief flight steward in MAS. He said if you go to Frankfurt you dont have to worry about food since there are many muslim restaurants in the area of the city. In fact there is a whole street full of Muslim traders. Turkish, Arabic, Iranian and Bangladeshis etc. But what the "interesting" part was the location of the street in Frankfurt.

If you have read my blog a few months earlier, you probobly noticed the post about the amount of Erotic shops in Mannheim city centre, right? Well, now its a little bit more "interesting" in Frankfurt. Directly across the main road in front of the Frankfurt Main Train Station, there is a street. in that street there are full of these erotic shops...it even had a erotic cinema! Its like shopping to Jalan Tunku Abdul Rahman , only most of the shops are erotic ones, if not restaurants...talk about a centralized red light district with direct access to public transport :p

What do the muslim traders have to do with this little red light story? Well, I knew there were mosques in the area near the train station, but i didn't know there was also a red light district there, so i stumbled across the red light district while finding the mosque. The street where all the muslim traders was exactly to the red light street! So once one has finished doing ones hanky panky business, one could always have the choice to repent ones sins. After all the mosque is just on the next street.

Anyways, i finally did eventually find the mosque. Quite disappointingly though, the people there were not as friendly as i expected...but I have no right to judge people i dont know...well i just wanted to pray, tahts all, so i didn't really mind.

After that i took the train to the Airport and checked in my baggage. but still i had to wait for a couple of hours for my flight and i didn't have much to do there. It was really a long time to be waiting......i spent my time thinking of what will i do if I could not get a room in The Malaysian Hall because in a couple of hours I will be on the flight to uncertainty..................

To be continued....