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Woke up this morning and we’re still headed to Cologne. Things are getting more populated along the river. We passed Dusseldorf at some point. We opted for a quiet breakfast managing not to sit with anyone so we didn’t have to make conversation. It gets a bit tiresome for every meal.
After breakfast, I went up to the sun deck to watch us come into Cologne. The cathedral comes into view from a long way off. It’s pretty impressive. The homes and shops along the river are old and colorful. We docked along with 2 or 3 other boats like ours. It’s pretty impressive how they can maneuver a ship this big. They basically parallel parked it.
We formed into groups for our walking tour. Ours was led by Rolfie, an older German gentlemen. He’s the least interesting of our guides so far unfortunately. First off, he seemed to be fighting a cold or emphysema or something. A lot of coughing. And he tended to not say much of interest, then repeat it a few more times. Some of it was interesting. I liked him more than Marion did who felt he was wasting what available time we had.
We did get a reasonable walk through the medieval part of Cologne. It’s very quaint Cobblestone streets and old (looking) buildings. Apparently a lot of it was rebuilt after WWII since most of the city (but amazingly, not the cathedral) were bombed into rubble. There was a plan to make the city modern but the people wanted to rebuild it to look like it used to so they did.
One of the benefits of the bomb craters was it created a lot of holes and in those holes they found various ruins from previous times – like Roman artifacts, tombstones and the like. And in one area where we walked, the ruins where the Jewish synagogue once was. They’re excavating and restoring it now. They had a lot more important things to rebuild after the war and they’re now getting to some of the other things they found. There’s apparently some concern about cost and the unsightliness of some of the plans for this particular area. Hard not to hear an undertone of ‘why are we spending money on the Jews’ in the tone of voice. But that may just be how I hear all Germans talk.
From there we crossed the street to the Cologne factory (the original Eau de Cologne where the name cologne came from). Apparently the guy who originally made it wanted to reproduce the smell of Italy on a spring day with the smell of citrus in the air. And he succeeded, it really does smell like that. Apparently he convinced King Louis XV of France to wear it and other royalty started and the rest is history. It cost a month’s salary for a typical person so the cologne people did very well for themselves.
As Rolfie pointed out, prior to some point in history, people did not wash. In fact, they thought they risked infection by getting wet. So they tended to stink pretty badly. Perfume was a big improvement and as the price came down, became widely used. Bathing, at least in Europe, is a relatively recent invention. And hasn’t completely caught on just yet, especially in France. But that’s a different story.
We walked over to the Rathaus, which is German for City Hall. A great name for a building filled with politicians if you ask me. (And a joke the guides hear day in and day out…) The building was built in the old style but is fairly recent except for one piece that survived the war. But it looks old and pretty cool. A couple was getting married as we came by.
From there we walked over to the cathedral. On the way we passed the German-Roman museum and heard (repeatedly) how they keep finding Roman artifacts whenever they dig. And this guy found a tomb in his basement and sold it to the museum for a lot of money.
So, on to the cathedral. Where we heard various stories about how the cathedral was built. It was started in 1248, and they finished the first part about 80 years later. That was the lower part. Then they ran out of money. More work got done on it at some point into the 1500’s (windows or something) but the tall spires were not done until much later. Sometime in the 1800’s they decided to actually complete it. Not so much for religious purposes but as a way to project power. The towers were completed using steam engines and more mechanical items. So they did the last part in only 30 years or so. The early part was done using 3 tools – hammer, chisel and rope and pulley. They hauled each stone up by hand and hammered and chiseled it into place. Hence the 80 years. Plus the fact there are something like 130 holy days in the Catholic Church where you’re not allowed to work.
Rolfie nattered on and on while we tried to figure out if we were going to get to go inside. Marion was getting angry I could tell. Much like the Hulk, you don’t want to get her angry. Finally, we found out we were on our own. So we went in, along with about 100 high school kids plus the crowd that was already in there. We couldn’t really get into much of it, just the back, but what we could see was pretty impressive. High soaring ceilings, huge pillars, beautiful stained glass windows. Really quite amazing. But it was crowded and we were ready to move on so we did. So if there were any famous sculptures or paintings or what not, we missed them.
We walked over to the nearby Ludwig Museum. A modern art museum. Picasso, Warhol, Mondrian, Lichtenstein and others. A kind of cool building. It had various nooks and crannies of art and no real flow to it. Likely on purpose as Marion said. But the result was it was sometimes hard to tell what was the ‘art’ and what was just there. For example, a box in the middle of the room with a door. Do you open the door? Normally you aren’t supposed to touch the art. Well, I did. It had an elevator inside (or what looked like one). Was it just the building elevator or some kind of artistic statement? Who knows? I didn’t actually try to make it work. The funniest thing was in one room, there were two benches with brochures chained to them that were not on exhibit but looked like they should be. They were actually the most interesting composition in the room. Ah, modern art.
The big excitement was when we went to retrieve our backpacks and Marion couldn’t find the claim check. After a panicked look through all her pockets we figured it must have fallen somewhere inside (3 floors, lots of hallways). So back in we went, past a new guard who we showed are tickets to, and who thoughtfully pointed us to where the Picasso’s were. We luckily found the ticket outside the bathroom (first place we looked) and came right back down stairs. The guard seemed surprised. I was tempted to say something like “if this is the crap you have on display we’re leaving!’ and really shake him up. But we explained what happened and he smiled and wished us a good day.
I should mention that the woman at the ticket/information desk sounded like one of those Las Vegas nickel slot ladies who’ve been smoking all their lives. Very gravelly voice. With the German accent, it was a bit frightening. Although she was very pleasant.
We were getting hungry by this point so it was time to venture into our first German restaurant. We had been pretty spoiled by Amsterdam where everyone speaks pretty good English. That hadn’t been the case in the museums. So we were a bit worried. But our waitress actually spoke very good English so we were ok. Although when the *other* waitress came over to explain that they were out of peach iced tea and would Marion like lemon, she did so in German. Surprisingly enough, with only catching a few words and the basic context, we were able to figure it out.
We had pizzas which were very tasty. We wanted to have a strawberry, whipped cream and ice cream sundae that looked *really* good but we were too full. And the place was starting to fill up with World Cuppers ready to watch the US-Germany match and a lot of them were smoking. In fact, there seems to be a lot more smokers here in Germany than we found in Amsterdam.
There was another museum that Marion wanted to see so we went walking over there. It was only open for 45 more minutes and I was kind of museum’d out. So I went walking while she visited but didn’t see much although I found a Dunkin Donuts. Sadly they didn’t have the kind we like. I tried to find my way to the famous bridge with all the locks on it, but there was road construction and I couldn’t find my way. The concept is people in love will attach a padlock to the bridge, then throw the key into the river to indicate they will be in love forever. There are thousands and thousands on the bridge.
As it neared game time the crowds at the cafes and pubs got quite large. People in the uniforms of the German team, wearing black, red and yellow leis around their necks or heads, draped in flags, etc. A few Americans too. They all sit outside the café in rows of chairs like a movie theater with TVs hung up to watch. I was really tempted to shout ‘USA, USA’ but didn’t have the nerve. I can’t run like I used to be able to.
We headed back to the boat where once again we were late for the morning briefing. We have many tardy slips already. We skipped dinner since we were still full from the pizza. I went down to the lounge to watch the end of the game with some people, but it was empty. Everyone was having dinner. Ah well.
There was an optional ‘beer crawl’ tour this evening but we didn’t have much interest in that. For the non-party crowd, they had a trio playing ‘classical’ music which I went to listen to (while writing this actually). Some classical but some ‘classics’ too, like Moon River. Very nice. They even managed to get a few people to dance and a good number of people to do a conga line of sorts to a Strauss march. The only problem was the man sitting next to me who hummed along to all the songs. Kind of annoying. Of course my typing was probably equally annoying to him. If he could hear it. Not so sure he could though. I’m not 100% convinced he actually knew where he was.
6/26/14
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