If you ever want to experience Fallout: New Vegas in person, your destination is not Vegas itself. It’s an approximately 8-block city square near the main train station in Frankfurt, Germany. You see some of this stuff in any American city; for example, I witnessed more than one person smoke a crackpipe tonight. That’s par for the course. What isn’t par for the course, at least in America, are streets dominated by foot-traffic, paying no mind to vehicles or cross-ways, with buildings lit up from the side in crimson red, and promises of female company within. There was a famous kiosk, just a hole in the wall, tiny little convenient store scarcely larger than a closet, and only accessible via its external ordering window, where the person grabs you a beer or cigarettes or whatever. And this place had no fewer than 100 people condensed around its tiny window, spilling out into the street, broken glass and cigarette butts everywhere. I’m proud to say the bar I went to was only a block a way from this scene, and only two blocks away from the tower of infidelity you see above, and the line of crackpipe smokers across the street. Still, a cool bar is a cool bar, and once we stepped inside, we could could easily forget that it was in the middle of Mad Max: Urban Sprawl.
The place is owned by two Turkish brothers who had to close down their first location some time ago. In the meantime, some trend-chasing burger-bar thought they could gentrify this 8-block paradise with its hip décor and overpriced menu. The city did not like that. Not. One. Bit. Sure enough, the burger joint closed and the brothers saw the opportunity to swoop in and serve the clientele they always meant to serve: pretentious normcore non-hipsters with Twin Peaks tattoos and masters degrees in useless humanities subjects like myself, who brave the Biff Tannen crime-riddled streets of an alternate reality future just so they can feel cool in a bar that probably wasn’t originally meant for them. Somehow, this place is the new wave. It’s like that episode in Shameless when The Alibi Room (the show’s main bar, kind of like Paddy’s Pub in IASIP, or MacLaren’s in HIMYM), a bonified local dive bar, is crowned as some trendy ‘rough-neck’ experience in a gastronomy magazine and then people like me show up.
This bar in Frankfurt, called Terminus Klause, straight up kept all the décor from the burger joint they snaked in after. Except, in every open space they could, they pinned up trinkets and china and pictures from Turkish culture, so that on one end you have Andy Warhol-derivative murals of Marilyn Monroe and on the other end a stone decorative sheep. It’s hilarious. You can kind of see what I mean in this picture below. The quirky fun colorful lights hang from the high ceiling to illuminate a cascade of Turkish china simply nailed to the wall. What you don’t see, and which hides just out of frame to the left, under the swords, is a large canvas painting of Mickey Mouse. I truly, truly cannot get enough.
We spent some time here, had a frew brews, some death-sticks, and then finally headed to a bar in a different part of the city for a night cap. This place was also sick, because they had whiskey sours with the egg white actually shaken into it for only 11 bucks. In Frankfurt? That’s huuuuge, It was more or less a ‘lounge’ rather than a bar, with very dim lighting, soft and deep seats, and bartenders clad in bowties. Sadly, I couldn’t snap a picture of this place because it was simply too dark, and I wasn’t about to be the guy with a flash going off.
Caught the 2:43am train home, got in at around 3:40am, and am ready to have a relaxing Sunday where I do basically nothing except write this this very post 😉
See you tomorrow,
Nick
Nick Denardi 