Ema
Ema
Nov 4 · 3 min read

I was wandering the streets of Frankfurt last week to kill some time while I waited for my husband who was attending a seminar. We agreed to meet at 5 pm at the hotel the seminar was being held at - a 5-star hotel called S Hotel. According to Google Maps, I was 4 minutes away from the hotel when my phone decided to die on me. There I was at the back alley of some buildings inhaling the thick scent of marijuana. Many shady looking men were eyeing me as I made my way to the other end of the alley.

Two European ladies were walking towards me and I breathed a sigh of relief.

“Excuse me?” I called out to them, wanting to ask for directions to S Hotel. The 4 minutes my phone had promised me seemed to be like 4 hours.

The first lady’s smile disappeared and she clutched the strap of her bag tighter.

I ignored it and asked, “Could you help me, please?” Mind you, I asked that in German. The woman behind her had a tight-lipped smile plastered across her face and avoided any eye contact with me. They walked by me quickly, avoiding me at all cost. There hadn’t been enough ganja in the air to keep me calm.

Not for the first time in my life, I was on the receiving end of this. What is ‘this’, I hear you asking. Well, this is the insecurity we feel when a stranger approaches us and we are on alert mode. “This stranger wants something from me and I don’t have time for this.” I’ll admit it - I’ve done the same to other people on the streets. To the foreign guy trying to get some donation from me. To the elderly lady who says, “Bitte, bitte (please, please),” while shaking her cup and begging for coins. To the young girl who told me her mother and brother were stranded at the bus station without any money to return home back in my homeland.

Of course, I was hurt by the actions of the women at first. Hours later, when I recalled the incident, I realised that their reactions were completely normal. It was a dodgy street after all and even I wouldn’t have stopped and answered a complete stranger had I been with another girlfriend. There had been incidents of people being tricked and ended up being robbed or kidnapped.

Being on the opposite end of the spectrum threw me off for a bit. I was used to judging a stranger based on their appearances when they approached me and there I was being judged by those women. As someone who is trying to learn from life, I wondered what the moral of this story was. Does this make me want to be kinder to future strangers I would be encountering? Honestly, no. Well, it all depends on time and place. And intuition. A bucketload of intuition

Also, if I were to open a 5-star hotel, would it be at around the corner of a dodgy alley reeking of weed so my guests could literally wake and bake? Nope. S Hotel, you could have done better.

    Ema

    Written by

    Ema

    On a journey to my Beloved.