What to Do on a 24-hr Layover in Frankfurt When You Have Traveller's Diarrhea
Go to the bathroom one hundred times on the plane over.
When you arrive at the Frankfurt airport at 5:30 in the morning, marvel at how organized each gate is. Let this comfort you and lull you into a false sense of security. Feel proud that you found and bought a European adapter at the first store you see. You’re going to win this day.
Find a bathroom, realize you are alone in it, shit again.
While you wait on the toilet, listen for the other woman who just walked in and farted loudly. You saved yourself from this embarrassment by rushing off the plane in a hurry and getting to the bathroom before anyone else.
Wash your hands and leave.
Go to baggage claim and wait for 20 minutes. While you wait, realize you have to shit again and find the next nearest bathroom. Luckily there are bathrooms everywhere at the airport. Let this lull you into a false sense of security and hype up your expectations that Germany somehow has bathrooms everywhere just in case you have diarrhea while visiting on your way back from your work trip.
Grab your bag from baggage claim and find the exit.
Fly way too close to the sun and decide to save yourself 10 Euros by trying to figure out how to take a tram into town. Google made it seem so easy but when you get to the machine to buy tickets for your particular train, it rejects you and tells you to find another machine.
Go to the machine nearest your gate number and buy what you think is a 1 day pass to anywhere in Frankfurt for 10.60 Euros. Celebrate how much money you’re saving by not taking a cab.
Realize that there aren’t any turnstiles or people checking ticket purchases for the train you’re on.
Oh. Okay.
Wait 10 minutes for the next train to arrive. Start to slowly panic that you may shit yourself before it even gets into the station to pick you up.
When the train arrives, find a seat and rock back and forth on it. Contemplate whether or not sitting will prevent you from shitting your pants before your stop.
Obsessively refresh Google to make sure you are in fact on the right train, heading in the right direction, and getting off at the right stop. Clench your whole body.
Curse your hubris for thinking you could save time and money by taking the tram. Ordinarily this would be fun and exciting but now you’re legitimately contemplating if it’s dark enough outside to be able to shit surreptitiously in an alleyway.
Once you get out of the tram station, find your bearings and immediately realize that it’s 6am, dark enough outside to shit in an alleyway without detection, and you’re in a foreign country and walking with your iphone out in plain sight of the other two people out this early.
Realize that no one cares.
Manage to find the hotel in record time and beg the two front desk people to let you check into a room early. One of the two, the chattiest man in the world, by the grace of God, obliges. The room is also, blessedly, on the first floor.
Go to your room, unpack your bowels, unpack your bag.
Take a shower in the middle of the room and wonder if it’s worth the effort knowing you will have to shit again in five minutes.
Try to sleep in.
Get up and realize that you’re wasting time in bed and feel guilt for no reason.
Descend the one flight of stairs to the lobby and meet the chatty front desk man again, accompanied by his coworker, shaved head lady. She is quieter.
Go for a long walk and look at the beautiful, old buildings.
Find the nearest Apotheke (lol) and speak to a kind pharmacist. Explain that you’re looking for Imodium and European skincare. She asks follow up questions about the Imodium and explains that as you’ve been travelling, your symptoms could be traveller’s diarrhea, food poisoning, or a gastrointestinal bacterial infection. She tells you that Imodium will lock any bacterial infection inside your body and will only provide temporary relief. You tell her that you wouldn’t mind the temporary relief if it meant you could do more sightseeing and she looks at you pityingly and offers a very logical, happy medium of an anti-diarrheal medication that will help you flush out any bacterial infection you may have. She strongly suspects it’s a bacterial infection. She explains everything so thoroughly and kindly. She’s the third person, after the hotel front desk people, that you’ve spoken to today.
She is so generous when you bring her Eucerin serum and under eye cream. She tries to find a rebate for the Eucerin but it doesn’t apply to the product you’ve given her, so she consults her coworker for samples she can throw in her paper bag full of German medicine. You pay her, thank her for her kindness, and leave.
You realize you haven’t eaten since the plane and it’s now 12pm. You would like a coffee but know that it will further anger whatever is living in your intestines.
You find a popular cafe and wait in line until you get to the front of the store where the most beautiful twenty year old woman is taking orders and the most beautiful twenty year old man is making everyone’s coffee. Stare at both of them.
The woman asks you what you’d like in German and you respond in English. You order a cappuccino because it has less milk, a prosciutto and mozzarella sandwich, and accidentally order two cannollis instead of one. You wait until everything is ready and you walk to a nearby park to sit and eat. You text your friends and family and try to see when the nearest museum is opening. They’ve been open for hours because it’s noon on a Saturday.
You go to an interesting looking museum and find that they have a building entirely separate from the others for the latest exhibit of Ottilie Roederstein. You have no idea who she is but figure that it’s important to support women in the Arts.
You walk around looking for a bathroom for ten minutes before you lose patience and ask the front desk people to help you find it. It’s in the basement. All the bathrooms in Germany are small, clean, white, and very private. It’s heaven. Every time you’ve walked into one it’s been empty for just enough time for you to empty the lining of your colon and wash your hands before someone else walks in.
You proceed to the rest of the exhibit hoping that you will be okay but you start to overheat in your hoodie and jean jacket. You’re sweating and the security guard looks at you with accusation in his eyes because you’re trying to figure out how to access their back sculpture gardens by going through a door that is clearly marked as an emergency exit only.
You’re confused about where you are and figure it’s best to get outside before you pass out. Your hands feel tingly and your feet swell and sweat profusefly in your shoes. Your ears start to ring and you know that you will faint, shit your pants, or both if you don’t leave immediately.
When you do make it out the correct door, you’re back to where you started and the sun feels oppressively hot in the sky.
You quickly give up on the prospect of finding the sculpture gardens and start the long walk home.
You feel hotter than you did in the museum despite the cold chill in the air. On any other day, the sun would feel lovely against your skin but you’re distracted by the sweat drying in your armpits.
You walk home along the water, hoping and praying that you’re enjoying the scenery and people watching enough. Unfortunately, you’re searching everyone’s face to determine if they are supportive and generous enough to help you instead of avoiding and making fun of you were you to shit your pants right in front of them.
Do they give out purple hearts for this?
Decide you aren’t a museum person after all and make plans to visit the Town Hall square where there are lovely old, distinctly German looking buildings. Every tourist website for Frankfurt insists on the importance of visiting the Town Hall.
Continue your walk back to the hotel and try to slow your pace to enjoy the views of the River Main. It’s objectively beautiful and peaceful but your stomach made an audible noise and now you’re panicking again.
Make it back to the hotel and say a prayer of thanks that the talkative front desk man is occupied by two other hotel guests. The shaved head lady is also there but avoids your eyes as you jump up the stairs two at a time to get to your room.
Once inside you rip off your jean jacket and top and spend the next five minutes in the bathroom. You contemplate taking another shower because of how sick you feel.
After a few minutes of dramatics, you open up your skincare and test out what you believe is moisturizer and under eye cream. The under eye cream smells strongly of chemicals and garbage and you throw up after putting huge dabs of it under your eyes. You scrub your face manically for two minutes hoping to get the smell off you enough to not have to puke again.
You decide to answer work emails even though it’s a weekend and you can’t think of a more depressing thing to do besides shitting yourself in public in a foreign city.
You answer emails, watch German tv, and fall asleep for an hour. Your dehydration wore you out.
After waking, you make a game plan to visit the Town Hall, an exciting and authentic looking restaurant specializing in serving “traditional German” food and then taking the slow way home. You see the Town Hall, move onto the restaurant and get overwhelmed because there is a group of four people waiting for a table in front of you. You realize that this must be a sign from God that you must move on to your backup restaurant, a recommendation from a friend who lived in Frankfurt for six months 10 years ago.
You walk to the River Main again realizing that you will need to get over a bridge to reach the new restaurant recommendation. You haven’t yet crossed the Iron Bridge but saw it earlier on in the day and convinced yourself it was too much of a commitment. Also the farther away and over water distance between you and the hotel was too daunting. Tonight, you feel differently. You took a nap, shit three times since, and are a new person now.
As you walk towards the second restaurant, you feel yourself getting hotter and fear passing out. You promise you’ll order takeout instead of eating there as a reward for being outside for this long without embarrassing yourself.
As you approach the restaurant, you see a large group of people waiting to be seated outside. There doesn’t seem to be much organization but everyone is standing patiently without any rush or fear on their face. As you try to make sense of the throng of people and where it starts and ends, you recognize a pizza place you passed earlier across the street has no lineup and many people working at it.
You try to look up the menu online and in English but realize it’s pizza so what are you even doing.
You abandon your “spot” in the throng and go to the pizza place. As you barge inside, you tell the first person you see that you won’t be staying but would like to order a Margherita pizza to go and an Aperol Spritz for while you wait. They ask if you want the Aperol Spritz to go and you consider it but then remember that the clinic doctor you saw earlier in your trip advised that you not mix antidiarrheal medicine with alcohol. Also to just not drink because your stomach was in turmoil and alcohol would further irritate your bowels.
The people working there don’t understand anything you’re saying in English and you make no effort to speak German because you are ignorant. You make it work regardless by pointing and gesturing to the menu and the pizza oven and you suspect that they are talking about you among themselves.
You chug the Aperol Spritz they’ve made for you and wait patiently while the pizza guy makes your pizza to go. You leave the change from your Euros on the table and run out of the restaurant into the cold night. The throng in front of the other restaurant has disappeared but you pay this no mind.
Every step you take in the direction of the hotel is making you feel lighter and better than you have the whole trip. You’re almost home. The front desk staff will have turned over at this point and you won’t know the new people there.
You reach the hotel and realize it’s 7:30pm and you will have the night to do whatever you want. This time feels scary as opposed to relaxing but you use it to eat your pizza, drink water and pack your bags slowly while watching the only English news channel. You army crawl from the floor to your bed at 10pm and put on the Netflix shows you downloaded before your trip. You read and slowly drift off into a dreamless sleep knowing you don’t have to get up early tomorrow.
You get up early anyway and decide to forgo your morning walk and coffee in favour of doing literally nothing in the hotel. Your bowels have not recovered since yesterday.
You laze around your bed and wait until the very last minute to leave the hotel. As you check out, you’re blessedly alone with the shaved head woman. You thank her again for finding the last possible room that was available to check in early to. She’s deferential and shows you a cab waiting outside to take you to the airport. The ride is quick and you arrive to the airport and home safely.