Cologne

Trip Start Apr 20, 2008
1
53
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Trip End Ongoing


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Flag of Germany  , North Rhine-Westphalia,
Sunday, September 28, 2008

I know I have already mentioned that Europe is ridiculously expensive but I just can't get over it. A two hour train ride from The Hague to Dusseldorf was going to cost us 60 euro.. that's $120!! For a TWO hour train ride!! We chose instead to catch a bus, which was a third of the price.. only problem was it took 6 hours! Although because of the bad traffic as we were doing loops around Holland it actually took 7!!!

I won't even get in to the fact that we never bothered to find out the location of Dusseldorf airport, had we done this we would have discovered that it is situated 1.5 hours north of the city and that going another hour south to Cologne was a bad idea! But anyway, we made a mistake and spent a lot longer on a bus than we should have. But anyway, back to Germany, we arrived quite late and went straight to the hostel I had booked right across the road from the train station only to find that our room and the whole building for that matter stank like cigarettes! Lovely! We headed out and got some schnitzels and beers to cheer ourselves up!

The next day we visited the dom, the huge cathedral right near where we were staying. It is a very impressive building both inside and out. It, apparently contains the remains of the three wise men?? We climbed the south tower which was about 15 minutes of constant climbing a narrow spiral staircase with no room to stop and rest!! There was a nice view from the top and we could go into the bell tower and see the HUGE church bells!

We went for a walk around the city and found a huge amount of buskers and one man walking along with a chain attached around his waist and foot with the remainder dragging along behind him making an awful racket!! I really wanted to re-live my awesome knodel experince from Innsbruck so we finally found a small restaurant that did knodel.. although it was leberknodel which was dumplings made from liver.. which were served in some sort of soup that just tasted like salt. I did manage to finish mine but felt really sick afterwards, it was disgusting!!! : (

In the evening we cooked dinner in our hostel and ate with some other Australian girls. The next day we went for a walk along the Rhine where there were some market stalls that just kept going and going and going! I got a huge sausage that Dave was supposed to share with me but then he bought chips so I had to eat the whole thing on my own!!! Then it was time to head to the bus station already to get on the 2.5 hour ride to arrive at the airport incredibly early!!!
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