Cologne/Köln

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Thursday, June 9.

Our intentions are to catch an 8:47am Inter-City Express train from Hamburg's Hauptbahnhof (Central Train Station) to Cologne/Köln which is to the south and west on the Rhine. At Köln we understand there are interesting boat tours on the Rhine and we plan on taking one. We ought to arrive around 1:00 in the afternoon, if we catch this train, and then we will take a Rhine tour in the afternoon.

From our Best Western hotel to the Central Train station is about a 10 minute walk but we need a cab to take our luggage. We've dawdled over breakfast where they have a yummy buffet built into the price and we don't get into the cab until nearly 8:37am. The morning traffic is at a stand still so we're at least 10 minutes late and of course the express train has come and gone. The station is very busy with 14 tracks with trains arriving every 10 minutes so there will be another along in due course. Not an express, but another one anyways.

Reg waits on the platform with the luggage while Kate and Cindy check out the shopping concourse. They get some orange juice from a McDonald's (McDonald's is everywhere) and some espresso at a coffee bar. They get some travel food (bread, cheese, sandwiches, snacks and that kind of stuff) from a Sebastian's kind of place — a deli. It's the place where we used the restroom as the train station loo was 1DM and we feared it would be a haven for street people, junkies and hookers. The the women's (DAMEN) rest room had two men and a lady filming but they insisted that the Kate could come right in. Kate later said that the street people hung around the station but didn't seem to come past the 1DM entry to the loo. Nope, they're inside too, they just don't move around very much. These restrooms in train and airplane stations in Germany have real baths! Travelers can freshen up. This might explain why the street people are hanging around and why the access costs 1DM.

Reg waited on the platform with the luggage and dealt with a looney, "Sorry, Ich spreche nicht Deutch" and a well-dressed down and out panhandler seeking some change.

We caught a later train and snacked and drank our way across Northern Germany in two different cabins. We started first in a non-smoking cabin and ended up later in a smoking cabin for the remainder of our trip. The train car was an older one with separate cabins, like on old English mysteries, each having six seats facing one another three across. The trick is to get a cabin with empty window seats. We grabbed the first cabin without noticing that the window seats had been reserved from the next major stop, Bremen, to Köln and from there onwards. When the older couple who had reserved these seats arrived we moved to an empty smoking cabin at the other end of the car and spread our gear around in hopes that no one would come along to join us.

The seats in these cabins fold down so you can stretch out and make the cabin into a big slumber party. This is much nicer for us than the Express Train which Cindy had taken from Zürich to Hamburg and that we had missed this morning. Reg and Cindy took the seats by the window where there's a small table for our drinks. Kate spread herself out at the door and we piled our luggage on the remaining seats. This had us monopolizing much of this cabin and fortunately no one came to join us.

We munched our way through our sandwiches, sweets, chips and popcorn leaving a trail of debris for the chipmunks. We drank our way through several orange juice and vodka, scotch, beer and one very nice "rot wein" from France. At the end of our trip our garbage from this little party has formed a huge pile. The garbage container supplied for disposing our waste was big enough to hold perhaps one beer tin and that only barely.

It was a fun train ride. We had been hoping for one of the new intercity Express trains like Cindy had from Zürich but that wouldn't have had the cabin for us to play in and have our little party. Along the way we decided to stay on this train and continue on through to Mainz which is up the Rhine just outside Frankfurt. We have a reservation for Friday and Saturday in Mainz when we plan to visit with Martin and his family. The idea is to leave some luggage at Mainz, return to Cologne, catch an afternoon boat tour, stay overnight in Cologne, ride the train to Heidelberg the next day and then return to Mainz. In retrospect it seems an awful lot to try to pack in.

The scenery along the Rhine looks something like this. There are steep terraced hillsides with vineyards interspersed with villages near the water, castles on the hillside, the train tracks on one side and a motorway on the other. The river is murky and swift flowing with barges transporting cargo up and down the river. Periodically there are local ferries travelling across the river. It's all very lovely.

When we arrive at Mainz we found out that the hotel we have reserved is out in the suburbs. This seems to be a dumb place for us to be staying but it turns out to be a nice American style hotel when we get there the next day. The tourist information in Mainz tells us that you can take a fast boat back to Cologne (a hydrofoil) but it left earlier in the day around 2:00. So we return to Cologne via the train with plans to catch one of these fast boats back on Friday. We have abandoned our plans to take a train to Heidelberg, we probably have had enough of train rides. Seeing the Rhine valley from a fast hydrofoil tomorrow sounds like a better idea.

The train back to Cologne has a dining car — they're often seems to be one to separate the first and second class cars. We'd like to sit and have a dinner but it's full; as is most of first class. It turns out the "empty" seats are held by those who are in the dining car. What shall we do? We find a car with three seats but one is for a fellow who must be in the diner. His magazine and pillow occupy his seat (the pillow looks like the fellow has hemorrhoids but it turns out to be a pillow that fits around your neck — we had not seen these before). Lots of people are standing on the train (in first class!!) because there are no seats and lots of the seats are sitting empty occupied by those who are in the dining car. We think this is just plain silly. We sit down, take his seat, and explain we'll move when and if the pillow man returns.

Kate and Cindy had some dealings with a server in the dining car. They wanted to know how, or if and when, they could get a table and he wanted to make them struggle through this in German. This is a difficult notion to try to articulate in a foreign language — it's well beyond "ein bier bitte" or "Ich bin kein Seemann". So they dug out their German phrase books and the server immediately reverted perfect English. I guess he just wanted to make sure they were trying to speak German.

We arrived back at the Cologne train station and step outside. Wow! Cologne is dominated by this incredible huge weathered Gothic Cathedral. Martin says it took 1,000 years to build, it looks a 1,000 years old. You walk out of the train station and it's right there towering on top of you with dark gray spires reaching to the sky. The scale is just so massive you feel dwarfed by it; it's jaw drop awesome. The girls are not as impressed. Cindy says it's not the Grand Canyon; Kate says it's not Arte Nouveau. We don't go into the Cathedral, we don't even wander around it, but on the Saturday we see another cathedral in Oppenheim. That one is more modest by far and is built of the clean red sandstone. But again it's a Gothic triumph from the middle ages.

We have dinner in the old city where people drink beer in beer halls (c.f. the "Beer Hall Putsch" of 1923). We end up in a small guest house restaurant where we struggle through the menu and end up with very German dishes. Reg has a dish served in a frying pan with all sorts of pork (chops and sausages), home fried potatoes, salad, etc. We enjoy the local beer and Reg wants to swipe another beer glass (they're uniquely tall, narrow and hold 2dl) for his souvenir collection but Kate suggests we buy one instead. That's too tough for him to even consider — how do you ask for the price of a beer glass without asking or getting the price of the beer? Kate somehow manages and it's a great that she does.

There's a legal issue on in the naming of beer. Kölsch is a beer uniquely from Köln. It's done in a Pilsner style brewed with ale yeast (as opposed to lager yeast and lagers are more popular in Germany). The name can only be used for beer that is brewed within the city boundaries. I recall the naming is/was limited to an area define by the walls of the original old city (but I read now that the name can be used for beer brewed according the requirements within 50km of the city center). In the old days, actually not that long ago, the beer was brewed right in the beer hall. This explains why Köln has more breweries than any other city. It also explains why the locals prefer draft beer and why each bar serves only a single Kölsch beer — the beer brewed right there.

We're having a hard time trying to get information and tickets for the fast boat trip up the Rhine tomorrow. Ultimately we find the river and where the cruise boats are parked. At the one they're busy boarding for an 8:00 dinner cruise. The ticket lady speaks very good English and apologizes that we have to wait as she takes care of late comers. We're happy to have found her and to be able to get tickets for the fast hydrofoil which dashes back and forth the Mainz. 

Light drizzle falls as the Rhine churns by and barges fight their way upstream. It's a big river powerful. Reg is terribly confused — isn't the river going the wrong way? He thinks we're on the east side looking west when it turns out we're on the west side looking east. Anyways he remained disorientated for quite some time. We're in fact on the side which belonged to France before Adolf Hitler and his troops marched into the Rhineland. That explains the naming: you would say Cologne if you're French, Köln if you're German.

We figured out the city transit. Again it's much like in Zürich and Hamburg with point-to-point fares and complex tables of sites. But the city isn't terribly big and we manage with the maps.

Slides scanned and notes composed during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, March 2022 — as if living through the OMIGOD! COVID variant wasn't bad enough! The diary entries were made by Cindy, Kate and Reg at the time.