Day Trip: Cologne, Germany

Today, we took our first real adventure outside of the comfort zone of our city or a neighboring military installation. We packed up the GTI and headed to Cologne!


How did we get there?
We decided to drive for this trip. Friends of ours mentioned they had taken a regional train to Cologne for a little less than 50 Euro, but it took 3 hours to arrive. We looked into an ICE train, but it would have cost close to 100 Euro a person to get there in around an hour. All in all, it took about an hour and 15 minutes to drive each way and less than a tank of gas. Since gas is subsidized for us and Greg drives a very fuel efficient car, it was less than $50 to drive, plus 10 Euro to park.

What did we do?
We only spent about 5 hours there. It was our first real venture outside of our city, so we were a little intimidated. About 2 days before, I looked online for highlights of what we really wanted to see, most of which was just the Kolner Dom and the Hohenzollern Bridge. Plus, I was looking forward to a trip to the Lomography store. We didn't have any set plans for the day, but were hoping to keep it pretty inexpensive. When we arrived, we headed over to the Dom first thing.

It's literally impossible to get all of the Dom in one picture. I probably have close to 100 pictures just of the inside and outside of it. As far as history goes, the Cologne Cathedral started construction in 1248 and was not finished until 1880. That's over 600 years of construction! Rumor has it, the Kolner Dom was also used as a shooting range by Allied forces towards the end of WWII and left in pretty horrible shape by the Americans. It is now the most visited location in all of Germany and is constantly under renovations.

We wondered around the inside for a long time before deciding to go in search of a bathroom. Pictures really don't do this place any justice. I went to the Notre Dame in 2005 on the same night that Pope John Paul II died and I really believe Kolner Dom was much more magnificent. After spending almost an hour just visiting, we paid 1.50 euros so we could both use the restroom and then decided to pay 3 euros a piece to take the 509 step walk to the top of the Dom.

Can I just say what were we thinking?! Call us ignorant Americans, but for some reason, it did not occur to us that an 800 year old building would have, you know, 800 year old stairs. Obviously, 800 years ago, they were not expecting 20,000 tourists to be walking up that stairway daily. Not only was it burning hot and extremely steep, but also intensely claustrophobic. When we got up passed the bell tower, it turned into this rickety metal staircase that swayed with every blow of the wind. After that, it turned back into another even narrower spiral stairwell up to the very peak which required you to walk across a small bridge and back down through a separate tunnel. Greg is claustrophobic and I am terrified of heights, so once we got up to the metal staircase, we knew we weren't going to make it much longer. I walked up high enough to snap a few pictures, but there was no way I was willing to go any higher and there was no way Greg could have handled another spiral staircase.

This was immediately after climbing at least 300 steps. We may or may not have inadvertently contributed to the graffiti behind us.

After half running back down the stairwell, we headed over to the Hohenzollern Bridge which is a couple yards behind the cathedral. The Hohenzollern Bridge is a pretty typical train bridge over the Rhine river with a small walking path that connects the older and newer areas of Cologne. On Pinterest, you may stumble upon a picture or two of the bridge and not even really acknowledge where it was located. The fencing of the bridge is covered by thousands of padlocks inscribed with the names of couples from around the world. The tradition is to affix a padlock with the lover's names and the date when it was added to the wall, then throw the key into the Rhine. When you walk along the fence, you notice padlocks that look thousands of years old, and ones that are obviously brand new, despite the fact that this bridge is less than 10 years old.

Of course, Greg and I had to take part in this. Luckily, thanks to two deployments and enough Tough Boxes to fill our whole basement, we had plenty of spare padlocks around to bring with us. Most of the locks were engraved, but since we only found ours the night before and it was already engraved with the words "U.S. ISSUED", we settled for writing over it with Sharpie several times.

Please forgive my face. I think it's Greg's goal to always catch me at the worst possible moment.

Greg throwing our key into the river.

Ironically, Greg and I met about 3 years ago today! We actually have no idea exactly when we met, but it was at some point in August, so we'll call it 3 years. Whatever.

After eternally locking a symbol of our love for each other to a bridge thousands of miles away from where our relationship started, we wondered around for another hour or so shopping and just looking at things before heading home. Our plan was to drop by the Lomography store since I'm *sort of* a film photog fan-girl and pick up the new Konstruktor, but the store was closed for renovation and full of half naked German men painting things. We also had a fun time looking at some of the leftover Roman artifacts of the area.

Just the sign. No store.

What would we have done differently?

• Been more prepared! Greg and I aren't planners. All of our vacations have been very impromptu. Even our wedding was planned by someone else with almost no help from us. We aren't the kind of people who are good at planning things out well in advance. We decided to go to Cologne on Thursday, spent Friday deciding what to see and left later in the morning on Saturday. If we plan to do much more traveling through Europe, we really need to learn to plan in advance so we can save money and decide what we'd like to see most.
• Museums: Museum Ludwig is a rather impressive museum in Cologne that is highly rated as one of the best places to visit in Cologne. If we have more time next time we visit, we'd love to spend some time looking through galleries, but we weren't interested in paying 17 Euros a person to have to rush through the museum. If you are interested in history, the National Socialism Documentation Center is located in Cologne and is considered one of the best exhibits on the history of Nazi Germany. I'd love to visit when we have more time, as it's located in a former Nazi prison and discusses a time in German history that is frequently passed over. If my dad comes to visit at any point during our three year stay, that may be on my list of places to take him, as he is a big WWII history buff. We saw most of the Roman-German History Museum from the outside, so I don't believe we'd go back to tour that museum in particular. There is also a Chocolate Museum, but growing up in Atlanta and going to the Coca-cola museum more times as a kid than I'd like to admit, I'm just not a big fan of food related museums.
• The staircase: I really wish we had been more prepared for the walk up the cathedral staircase. If it was cooler and we would have been dressed more appropriately, I think we may have been able to sucked it up until the top. We still got some great views, but I always underestimate how much I can't stand heights.
• Food: Have I ever mentioned how cheap I am? We ate before leaving, packed snacks and ate when we got home. Greg mentioned that he feels we miss out on the culture when we don't eat out occasionally and I agree. I just can't justify spending money to eat things that I feel aren't healthy for me or that I may not like. I know, get over it, but when you have dietary restrictions and as weak of a stomach as I do, passing up eating out for leftovers at home is really not that difficult. In the future, we'll probably budget to eat out once in a while when we travel.

Take away:
All in all, we had a nice and inexpensive getaway from our every day boredom here in Army Land. It cost us less than $70 to view some of the major areas of the city and gave us some ideas of other things we'd like to do when we come back in the future.

I leave you with a statue of Augustus Ceaser on one of the other beautiful buildings we saw in Cologne. Since Augustus Chihuahua didn't come along on this trip, we had to find another little Augustus in Cologne!