Cologne, Germany
Trip Start
Apr 11, 2006
1
15
26
Trip End
??? ??, 2007
Cologne,
Germany
Thursday, July 6, 2006
Cologne, or Köln, is an interesting town. Unfortunately, we only had a few hours there between the overnight train ride from Berlin, during which we barely got any sleep at all, and the quick trip to Aachen. We arrived sometime around (just before, I think) 6:00AM, exhausted and really in no mood to be tourists. Found some breakfast in the train station and then used the McClean (no joke: a privately operated restroom chain in train stations - as with most public restrooms in Europe, you pay a small fee to use it, and it remains pretty clean) to freshen ourselves up.
To be completely honest, I can't really remember the exact sequence of events - yes, we were that exhausted - but I'll do my best. I think our first action was to visit the famous gothic Cologne dom (cathedral, pronounced like the English dome), which, enigmatically, was one of the only buildings in the city to get through WWII with little damage
01 Dom
. This is especially strange since bombs are said to have been dropped extremely close to the church. Yes, this is an impressive structure; I think the outside is more outstanding and more beautiful than the inside, but both are very nice. Regardless, we sure do have a lot of pictures of it. This is really starting to feel like "Europe's Best Churches".
The file order of our digital picture folder indicates that our next step was to meander our way through the city while taking a general bearing toward the Chocolate Museum. On the way, Meredith took a very funny picture of me looking like I'm about to pass out right next to a Welcome to Cologne sign and in front of a Gilden Kölsch trailer. This brings up two points. First, this would not be Germany if things weren't written in English. You really do see just as much English in Deutschland as you do German. Second, Köln is known worldwide (OK, here and there) for its fantastic style of beer, Kölsch. A hoppy (somewhat bitter, but not too much so), crisp, and sometimes malty brew, Kölsch is one of my favorites, especially in warm weather. If you're in Athens, go check out Copper Creek's take on it - it's their best beer as far as I'm concerned, the only one with which they really hit the nail on the head (full disclosure: I'm not a fan of oatmeal stouts, but I hear that among them, CC's is pretty good).
So...the chocolate museum. I didn't find it very interesting or informative, but that is probably more due to the fact that I was still a walking zombie. Meredith enjoyed it well, and seemed to learn a lot. The museum takes you through the steps of chocolate making, how chocolate came to be, where the various ingredients come from, who is responsible for getting them grown and to the right places, and where in the world the ingredients and the chocolate itself are produced
02 Dom 2
. There was also a small assembly-line-style factory area and an indoor rainforest in which a cocoa tree or two blended in with a pretty dense group of other plants. Looking back, it seems pretty interesting. Next up was the Beer Museum, but unfortunately, it was closed. Instead, we grabbed a beer from a nearby outdoor café, where the waiter told me to just take my glass with me if I wanted, we and rested a while before roaming around some more. The camera battery died at this point, so there's not much more that I remember besides going to probably the biggest music store I've ever seen. They had separate floors for drums and percussion, guitars, DJ equipment, and other stuff as well, and each floor was basically its own shop, full of friendly staff and folks (mostly kids) just checking out the huge variety of instruments. I bought some guitar strings, and after a long while, we took off for the train station, grabbed our things from the automated underground storage machine, and hopped on the train to Aachen.
Overall, Cologne is a cool town, but I really didn't get such a well-developed impression of it. Though this is not surprising given that we were only there for a few hours, I would have thought it would be more appealing. The variety of architecture, most of the buildings having been constructed since WWII ended, is not so great, and the city seems not to have much of a personality - no real vibe that I could pick up. Although my first impressions weren't so great, I'd definitely go back to Cologne to give it a real chance.
