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September 28, 2023
This is a story about the largest city in Germany - that no one has ever heard about
I visited this city thirty four years ago - as part of my 1989 trip around the world.
At the end of September during that trip we flew from Prague to Frankfurt where we were scheduled to pick up our Eurail passes and then catch a train to Munich.
We were delayed out of Prague by about an hour, but we eventually got to Frankfurt around mid-day.
We took a taxi from the airport to the Frankfurt train station where we got our Eurail passes validated.
The Eurail passes were good for 21 days and would allow us to travel in First class on any train between almost any city in Europe.
We then found our train.
It took us a while to figure that there were First Class and Second Class cars on the same train so we had to walk between cars to get to one of the First Class cars that we had paid for.
Since we were new to train travel in Europe, and did not speak the local language - aside from being able to order beer and ask for directions to the toilet - we had previously asked some people at the Frankfurt airport how would we know what city we were arriving in.
They said it was very easy - because the name of the city would be prominently displayed on the train platform of each station.
That made a lot of sense.
About 15 minutes after leaving the Frankfurt train station we had a brief stop and I looked out to the platform and I saw a big sign that said "Ausgang" so I figured that was where we were.
At the next stop about 10 minutes later, I saw another sign reading "Ausgang" so I figured we were still in "Ausgang".
About 15 minutes later when we stopped again, and I saw another sign saying "Ausgang".
At this point I figured that - either "Ausgang" was the largest city in Germany that I had never heard of, or it was not a city name.
I turned to nice German couple sitting nearby and politely asked them - "Excuse me, what does Ausgang mean?"
The woman smiled, looked at me and in almost perfect English said - "It means Exit"
I am an idiot.
