Berlin-Koln

Cosine and I got up early the next morning, had breakfast with Dad and Shorty, then walked to the train station.  Cosine had to buy his ticket for Koln, so we got into the ticket line.  We weren't sure if I needed to get a reservation for this train--it was an ICE (Inter-City Express, Germany's high speed trains), so when it was Cosine's turn, I went up with him.  The woman behind the counter glared and started barking at me in German, motioning for me to move back to my place in line.

"He's with me," Cosine told her, or so I assume.  She calmed down.

The transaction was quick, and with my pass, I didn't need to do anything extra. We waited in the lobby.  A large tv screen alternated between news and insipid boy-band videos.  A woman walked around her suitcase in wide circles, chain smoking.  The tv ran on 15-minute loops.  We got through the whole program 2-1/2 times before going up to the platform.

The ICE is pearl grey and seems more confident of its superiority than the French Thalys.  It doesn't feel the need to be red.  It has sliding glass doors inside.  Cosine and I found a seat quickly.  Since Berlin was the first stop, it wasn't particularly crowded, though as the trip went on, the train got more and more packed.  A Chinese family sat behind us, and Cosine and I occasionally were able to pick up bits of their conversation, though our Chinese skills were both so rusty we couldn't understand more than basic phrases.

Once we got out of the train station in Koln, we were immediately confronted with the hulking mass of the cathedral.  Situated barely 300 feet and up a few flights of stairs from the train station, the cathedral is less building than mountain.  Its walls are so thickly carved that they're indistinct, a melted candle.
 

The cathedral in Koln.

First thing, we turned left and took the bridge over the Rhine toward the youth hostel to check in and relieve ourselves of our bags.  The Rhine's a wide river, and it's a long bridge, but it wasn't really a bad walk at all.  On the other side, it took us maybe 10 minutes to find the hostel.  The directions we'd obtained online got us in the right area, but finding the hostel took a little trial and error.  It's an eight story building next to an office building occupied by Ford.  A sign posted on the door warned travelers of muggings in the area around Koln-Deutz, a nearby train station (not the one where we had arrived).

Our check-in went smoothly, an experience quite contrary to the one being had by a young Japanese woman checking in at the same time.  The man helping her (in English) seemed to be making a point to be as rude as possible.  It was not a pleasant situation.

The room was comfortable enough, with eight beds.  Thus far we seemed to be the only ones here.  The hall smelled funny.  Showers were in the basement, and there was no kitchen.  On returning from our exploration of the hostel, we found a guy who looked like our cousin Seamus in the room, playing with his cell phone.  He didn't look at us.

Cosine and I headed back to the train station to grab a quick lunch.  Cosine got some currywurst--sausage with catsup topped with curry powder.  This is one of the German specialties I loathe, chiefly because of my antipathy toward catsup.  I went to a sandwich shop and ended up with a bizarre sandwich involving a deep-fried turkey filet with what I can best describe as a bastardized barbecue sauce.  There is a certain liberation to not being able to speak the language of the country you're in: when you order menu items at random you don't quite know what your next meal's going to be.  In this case, my gamble paid off rather well.  Strangeness aside, it was really good, if a bit messy.

It's tough to convey just how huge the cathedral, where we headed after lunch, is.  It seems impossibly high, and makes Notre Dame look like a little country church.  The facade towers over the people walking across of the disproportionately small plaza in front of it.  It seems like it could create its own weather systems.
 
 

The cathedral.  You're not even seeing half its height here.

I don't know enough of my architectural terminology to explain what the interior of this church looks like in any way that would give you any accurate picture of it in your mind's eye.  Not nearly as dark as Notre Dame nor as bright as the extraordinary cathedral in Freiburg, I can only say that the cathedral has all the standard side altars, ambulatories, and other trappings one expects from a cathedral.  But the ceilings do soar, and upon entrance, the altar seems impossibly far away, and the high altar is barely in sight.  After spending 45 minutes or so walking through the church, Cosine and I paid our 3 marks to climb one of the towers.

It's a long climb up a narrow spiral staircase, the walls covered with graffiti, some of it plainly quite old (Ich liebe Michael Jackson).  Periodically we had to squeeze against the walls to let people on the way down pass.  There were few windows on the way up, so it was difficult to gauge our progress.

Maybe halfway up, there was a landing where you could get out of the stairway traffic and take a look at the bell.  I have no idea if there are more bells in the other tower, but there is just one bell in this one, and it's impressive.  I didn't know it was possible, or for that matter, desirable, to make a bell this big.  It makes the Liberty Bell look, well, like a little cracked bell.  I did a little research after coming home, and it turns out that this thing that hangs almost ominously in the cathedral tower is called the Petersglocke, weighs 25 tons, has a diameter of just over 11 feet, and is the heaviest swinging bell in the world.  It looked like you could fit one of those big sewer cleaning balls from Paris inside it.

Resuming the ascent, we emerged from the spiral staircase in a large room. Light streamed in from windows above us.  We weren't at the top yet, just at the point where the spires finally started to taper.  In the center of the room an aluminum staircase was bolted to the floor.  We climbed.  I pulled down my hat a bit to try to take the edge off the wind blowing in all around us.

Finally we reached the top and took in the view.  The trouble with looking at Koln from the top of the cathedral is that the cathedral really is Koln's most prominent landmark.  It's not like the top of the Eiffel Tower where you get the panorama of all the sights of Paris; aside from one other church and a tall television tower, there's not much to see.  But there is a great look at the roof of the church, and beyond that, the roof of the Ludwigmuseum, its curves mimicking the lapping of the Rhine.
 
 

View from the tower.

It took us a long time to descend, first because we were dodging sightseers coming up, and then because we went step by slow step behind a woman escorting her two small and easily distracted children.  Coming out of the church doors, I spotted the American Express office directly ahead of us, and stopped in to change about $70 worth of Dutch guilders I'd been carrying around in my pocket since leaving Amsterdam.

Cosine and I didn't have a travel guide, so we didn't know quite where to go from here, so we just headed the most obvious place from where we were standing, the long, upscale shopping street that terminates at the cathedral plaza.

We didn't do any shopping today, just walked and looked into windows.  Aside from the cathedral, Koln is known for its Romanesque churches, some dating from as early as the 1100s, and the street we were on passed by a few of them amid the street vendors and department stores.  Finally arriving at a park wreathed by streetcar tracks and guarded by a grizzled man with two llamas tethered to his wrist, we decided to head back to the hostel for dinner.

Coming back near the cathedral, we spotted the tourist office, and stopped in to pick up whatever free information we could get about Koln.  The selection was sparse; all we could find was a city map  Back at the hostel, Cosine and I pulled out the leftover bread and cheese from Christmas dinner and polished it off, then studied a Koln events guide to see if we could come up with anything interesting going on this evening.  Remembering that Katja (attentive and faithful readers will remember her from the  Iceland travelogue) was from Koln, I got online and sent her an e-mail to see if she was in town (which I doubted, since last I knew she was in Wales with a man she'd met in Iceland), or if she had any ideas.  I didn't hear back from her till I got back to the States, unfortunately.

Nothing really piqued our interest, but by comparing the addresses of the bars to the map, we figured out where a lot of the bars listed seemed to be concentrated, so we headed that way.  There was a streetcar stop not far from the hostel, in the middle of a busy street hugging the Rhine and accessed by a bridge.  On the way there, we observed the liquor/cigarette/porn stand across from the hostel, shuttered during the day but open now that night had fallen.  Once we got to the station, during the time it took us to puzzle our way through the zone chart and ticket machine, one streetcar came and went.  After another 10 minutes or so, another showed up.  We went south for a bit, till we took a turn onto a bridge across the Rhine, and came to the same plaza where we'd seen the llamas earlier.
 

Llama in the twilight.

As it turned out, our map reading had been fairly inept, and we walked through an area of closed or closing cafes and shops.  We took turns at random, eventually coming to a busy street with a movie theatre and a packed Mexican cantina next door.  We weren't really after a cantina tonight.  Turning up another street past a laundry and a gay flower shop, we saw an Irish pub.  I can't help but be of the opinion that Irish pubs, throughout Europe a haven for English speakers, are for traveling wimps afraid to immerse themselves in local culture, but tonight this just seemed easy, and a Guinness sounded good.

We sat and talked over beer for a couple hours.  I flirted idly with the waitress, which puzzled Cosine, and for that matter, me, but I just chalked it up to the Guinness.  She wasn't responding anyway.  We headed back to the hostel, finding when we arrived at the subway station nearest the bar that Koln's train system clearly suffers from an identity crisis.  Here it was underground, other places it traveled atop the street, and back at the hostel it was sunken below the road's surface.

Cosine went to bed immediately.  I read for a while in the hostel's common room.  A young man came and sat down across from me.  He lit a cigarette, then started making strange gurgling sounds in is throat.  He got up and spit out the window.  He sat down and started a meticulous list in his notebook of every fennig he'd spent.  I went to bed.

Next--December 28: Translating pants sizes