Euro 2024: Some may consider German city, Frankfurt to be the most boring host – but it’s actually a cultural marvel

Frankfurt? That city near the Main River, with all the banks and financial institutions, kind of like a German Canary Wharf with amazing cakes, isn’t that one of the more boring host cities for Euro 2024?

Rethink your opinion if you were watching the games and believed that this was the boring part of Germany. Frankfurt is home to top-notch galleries and museums as well as the unique blend of cultures that comes from being one of Germany’s most varied cities.

Prepare yourself for Botticelli, Turkish food, and hip hotels in addition to exciting football. Additionally, be ready for a city that is anxious to refute any notion that it isn’t thrilling.

The best place to see this is in the vicinity of Alt-Sachsenhausen, which is the district south of the Main River with its cobbled medieval pathways filled with pubs and an atmosphere that resembles a flammable cross between York and Magaluf in the evening.

All very good fun if you like to get rowdy, but if you prefer something a little more sophisticated, check out the bars in the Bahnhofsviertel neighborhood, which is the area right around the massive Neo-Renaissance facade of the Frankfurt railway station.

If that seems too edgy for you, go over to Wiesenhüttenplatz, where Yok Yok Eden, one of the buzziest outdoor bars in the city, sets up shop under the trees every evening.

You’ll need to eat if you’re hoping to pour a few jugs of Apfelwein, Frankfurt’s rather potent take on cider. Head towards the “new” opera house, one among the city’s many attractive examples of underappreciated post-war modernism, by following the parallel roads Kaiserstraße and Münchener Straße, which stretch east from the station.

Plenty of contemporary European dining alternatives can be found on Kaiserstraße, but once you cross over to Münchener Straße, you’ll find yourself in a world of Turkish and Middle Eastern eateries.

For more amusement, look up above the street. Mainhattan, the nickname for Frankfurt, is known for its rooftop drinking culture. There are bars atop residential buildings and museums, as well as rooftop bars that are visible from other rooftop bars.

Above Gekko House, a trendy boutique hotel with a Chicago-style barbecue restaurant, is a nice, laid-back area where patrons can look up from their post-BBQ whisky sour to the Skybar, a circular patio at the top of Tower Number One that is 199 meters above.

Although it is tall, the 200-meter Main Tower is the true tallest, with a difference of only 100 centimeters. Its observation deck doesn’t have alcohol service, which is perhaps a good thing considering the breathtaking views of the city below and the Taunus Alps.

Admirers of much smaller structures should squeeze into the renovated AltStadt medieval district, which is located between the cathedral and the elaborate Romër municipal hall. The area surrounding The House of the Golden Scales, a popular Instagram destination and a branch of the city’s renowned Historisches Museum, is expected to be bustling.

The final phase of the rebuilding for the quarter was finished in 2018. Sadly, for fans of brutalism, the AltStadt project meant demolishing a magnificently desolate concrete parking structure from the postwar era, but fortunately, another mid-century beauty still stands just five minutes’ walk away.

Built in 1954, the Kleinmarkthalle food hall is a long wedge made of glass, steel, and masonry. There are fantastic pubs and restaurants nestled into the arched roof on the upper floor, and the stalls are brimming with fresh fruit.

The Kleinmarkthalle has been a longtime favorite of Frankfurters, and preparations are in place to keep it intact for a further 70 years.

They have good cause to take Frankfurt’s building situation seriously. The house of the 18th-century author Goethe was destroyed by Allied bombing in 1944 and subsequently reconstructed, just like a lot of other things in the city.

The ultimate product, the Goethe House, is an accurate replica, but don’t linger too long wondering what the great man’s chamber pot could have looked like. The amazing 1921 Deutches Romantik Museum, which is connected, is the main draw here.

The exterior’s pale yellow curves and flat planes are meant to evoke both Jugendstil and Bauhaus. The inside is filled with several square meters of tactile concrete walls that are lined with hundreds of books at one end—this is the pinnacle of hip architecture.

Located directly across Gutleutstraße from Wiesenhüttenplatz, Roomers is the hippest thing the hotel industry has to offer. Though the hotel’s outstanding in-house pan Asian-Californian restaurant Burbank offered some quite stimulating interactions, my most exciting one was with some zingy yellowtail mackerel.

The decor are gloomy and the accommodations are opulent. The tables face out into a courtyard that transforms into one of the nicest outdoor bars in the city come nightfall. The on-site bar is open until 4 a.m., but 116 bedrooms have Marshall sound systems if you want to continue partying.

Frankfurt’s surroundings are among the best for the somewhat inebriated, and the most of them are located on the south side of the iron footbridge Eiserner Steg that leads to the Museum Embankment.

This impressive permanent collection, which includes works by Vermeer, Monet, Degas, Dürer, Reubens, and Van Eyck, is housed in the majestic Städel Museum. It is just as beneficial to spend a few peaceful moments with Botticelli’s Idealized Portrait of a Lady as it is to take two aspirin.

The Liebieghaus museum, a 19th-century Brothers Grimm castle brimming with sculpture from antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, is located nearby. This visitor’s head was resting on the lawn, which is covered by the indoor cafe. Frankfurt is therefore not at all dull. To be fair, though, there is a good amount of cake.

Original Post Published by https://www.independent.co.uk