WC2006: With Apologies To Roxanne

WEGA RESTAURANT, FRANKFURT (9:51pm local time) -- A gratuitous visit to that most American of establishments - McDonald's - and lots of happy Italians listening to awful music really loudly push the homesickness from my mind, so now it's time to walk.

What I'm learning is that I have a three- or four-day learning curve in a new city, and here I'm compressing that into a day and a half. So I walk fast. I find the main shopping drag, but while it's a pretty street and a nice enough atmosphere, it's still just a bunch of boring stores.

The Zeil opens up into a large square where there are Italians celebrating, but also a whole lot of them surrounding a German ambulance. Not sure of what happened, I walk on after a cheer goes up among the crowd.

I find my way to the Old Opera House (Alte Oper), which was beautiful, with a fountain out front and the sun finally starting to dip on the horizon. Winding my way down towards where I I think there's a U-Bahn stop, I walk through some nice landscaping near the main tower.

Out of the corner of my eye, I notice several three- and four-story buildings adorned with pink and red neon lights. Could it be? Yes, it's my first real red light district, unless you count the sex shops by Zoo Station in Berlin.

My first thought is that I have to walk through it. My second thought, after about two and half blocks of similarly-themed venues, is that this is kinda creepy.

Suddenly and unexpectedly, there's the Hbf. I'm a little off course. And now the Main, so I'm totally turned around. I start to actually check street names on my map, and end up walking to the part of town - Sachenhausen, which is on the other side of the river from where I've been all day - that I was hoping to reach by train.

I'm glad to have found it, because this area is much, much nicer than pretty much everywhere else I had been all day. Which I would have known had I paid more attention to the e-mail my Berlin host had sent me a month ago.

That e-mail, as I mentioned earlier, also had restaurant recommendations, and one of those is where I take in the Switzerland-Ukraine match and dread the twenty-minute walk once I get back to Walldorf.