I'm taking advantage of one last night with a convient next door to the hotel internet cafe to post. It's onlz been a couple of days since my last post, but they have been completely packed! Tuesday evening I walked back through Dusseldorf to the hotel, a good walk, and almost got lost. I don't mind getting lost midday, but at 8:30 it's a bit different. Fortunately, it stays light until almost 10 PM here.
Wednesday we visited Cologne, or Kohn, as the locals call it. Dusseldorf and Cologne have a major rivalry going on. Think A&M vs UT. but even more intense (yes, it is possible) Cologne was founded in 34 BC as the furthest outpost of the Roman Empire, so they have some majorly old and majorly cool Roman artifacts, including a tile floor that's in better shape than some I've seen in houses today. And it was over 200 years old! Cologne got bombed basically to rubble in WW2, but they rebuilt some of it in the old style. It's really weird to think that we the US and the other Allies were the ones that destroyed all those ancient and irreplaceable sites, but we can't really be sorry. Fortunately the Cathedral survived. It's really old, started building in the 1200s but not finished until the 1800s. It's absolutely magnificant, beautifully breathtaking, and whatever other superlatives you can imagine. It contains the remains of the three wise men. It also contains what is probably the only modern art stain glass in a cathedral. It is made of hundreds of little colored squares. The Cologners seem very proud of it.
In the afternoon, we went to the Cologne Zoo. We got a guided tour, and the poor lady didn't know what to do with a group of vet students that wanted to know if rhinos were hindgut fermenters! We still learned a lot, and got to get up close and personal with several of the animals. We talked to the bear keeper, and got within a couple of feet of an enormous brown bear. We got to touch the giraffes, and see a baby that was only a week or two old! We even got to go behind the scenes with the elephants. One of the babies came over and touched all our hands with his trunk. We got to see lots of other animals, including Okapi, monkeys, owls, rhinos, cheetahs, and the amazingly rare and cool animal, the raccoon. Yes, the Cologne zoo has an exhibit of raccoons. Several of us offered to ship them ours!
In the evening we went to an Irish pub and watched a football (sorry, soccer) game. It was a very exciting, evenly matched game that went into double overtime then a kickoff. I don't follow soccer, but I got to sit with a German lady who kindly answered some of my questions about Germany. I'm curious about the nontouristy things, like if German children get eggs from the Easter bunny and if people tend to stay in the same town their entire lives. The pub got rowdy and a bit smoky, and the men ended up singing by the end of the game. We finally left around midnight.
Today we slept in and then went to Bonn and some town I can't pronounce to take a cruise down the river then hike up a (small) mountain to see a castle and some ruins. It was a paved road we walked up, but it was about a mile of a 30 degree incline. I suspect there will be some sore legs tomorrow! The view at the top was absolutely breathtaking, though, and the ruins came with a story of some hero of a musical slaying a dragon there. There was a dragon marionette that would tell the story for a Euro, in German. Actually, I just assume that's what he was saying. The castle was beautiful, but under reconstruction so we couldn't see most of it. There was a museum about wildlife conservation on the grounds that was quite informative. The whole area seemed to be a very popular day trip for German familys, there were a lot of familys complete with pet dogs making the climb along with us. It was humbling to see the older people having less trouble with the hike than us, The castle was relatively new, built in the 1850s, and bombed in WW2. After a long hike back down the mountain, we were all ready to go back to the hotel and pack up to leave for the Netherlands tomorrow.
This post was probably way too long, but I wanted to write it all down so I can remember. Til next time!
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