Fun, Food and Kpop.Flex at Frankfurt, Germany

My highlight of the spring was when me and my flatmate travelled to Frankfurt, Germany for the weekend to Kpop.Flex festival. We actually only had tickets for Sunday, which left us plenty of time to walk around the city we both visited for the first time.

River Main at Frankfurt during a hot spring day.

The weekend was quite successful with the best company, excellent food and PERFECT weather. We arrived to a sunny, 28°C Frankfurt from 11°C Finnish weather and quite fast we swapped our warm coats to summer dresses and wondered the Frankfurt streets.

We also got great tips from a local. Just as we were about to get off the plane, a woman sitting next to as started talking to us and asked if we were in the city for just the weekend. We told her that it was the case and asked if she had anything to recommend doing or seeing. I gave her my phone and she wrote down as many things as she could think in the few minutes we had. It was a shame we didn't talk at all to each other earlier during the flight but we were really thankful for the tips she gave us.

During the first evening we walked by the riverside, found the Frankfurt old town, and the historic square Römerberg, and just roamed around the city. We tried some famous apfelwein (apple wine) and other apple ciders, and stumbled upon a night market with some dj's and I enjoyed some curry wurst. Food makes me smile the most nowadays as you can see below.

European Central Bank & Bethmannpark

On Saturday we walked a lot and stayed outdoors plenty. We visited the European Central Bank and continued walking in parks that are connected to each other in the city centre. We stopped for ice cream once it was time for me to participate on my Korean classes. It was not the best spot for an online class with video on, but I did join them for an hour and then we had to continue our roaming.

Inside one of the parks we found a smaller park, Bethmannpark, a peaceful Chinese style garden with pagodas, a pond with koi fish and even a small water fall.

In the evening we found a great Korean restaurant for dinner and enjoyed some tteokbokki and kimchi-bokkeum with soju in the theme of the festival we were going to attend the next day.

Kpop.Flex-festival

Kpop.Flex-festival was the main reason why we had decided to spend a weekend in Frankfurt in the first place. It was arranged for the first time and held in the Deutsche Bank Park football stadium and surroundings. There were 63 000 visitors during the two days. We bought tickets after finding out that Mamamoo, Kai and Monsta X were going to perform so close to Finland, but ended up listening more music from the rest of the artists as well before attending.

I'll only talk about the unfortunate side of the festival here briefly as we were not hugely affected by it. Soon after arriving to the site, it became quite clear that the event was held for the first time as there were a lot of problems with communication between the festival management and the event goers. The hot and sunny days meant that people were drinking lots of water during the festival. The one spot for free water was not marked anywhere and there were no maps, so not many people knew about it. Also the communication of the artist's performance timetable was quite poor, but gladly we didn't miss any performances. Hopefully they'll listen to feedback and fix all the problems for the next year.

In the end, for us, the festival was quite fun. We lined up for free food from the spicy noodle stall and got some tasty dishes from the Korea Agro-Fisheries & Food Trade Corporation stand. And I bought a cheese pretzel (see my happy face again). We also were positively surprised on how many tourism related booths there were and ended up getting many brochures and much information on where to visit or what to do while traveling to Korea - as we have planned to do so in September.

September! It is starting to get closer and closer. My trip to Australia will start from Korea, and after travelling to couple other countries as well I'll reach Down Under at the end of October. More about that later!