Cologne

In the interest of catching up in my posts, and because there is less I'm interested in writing about Cologne, this post will be more brief and include both full days we spent there.

On our first full day, Conny walked us around the city to several points of interest. We began with a Seilbahn (sky train) ride over the Rhein, which offered a great first look at the city along this famous river. We walked through Rheinpark and then made our way to the Cologne Triangle Panorama, one of the tallest viewpoints in town.

After snapping a sufficient amount of aerial photos, we took to the streets of the Altstadt, where we found a nice spot by the river to have lunch. Afterwards, we walked over to visit the tallest church tower in Germany and the fifth tallest in the world, the Kölner Dom (Cologne Cathedral). Quite a magnificent structure, both inside and out.

After getting back from our afternoon walk around the city, we got ready for an exciting night out: Conny's friend was opening a new swanky club in Dusseldorf and she had gotten us on the guest list. Turned out, we had to wait in multiple lines before we could ultimately get to the part of the club worth going to, and by that point I think the evening had soured. We left the club a little later, after dancing a bit and paying too much for drinks (clubs in Dusseldorf aren't so different from those back home, apparently) and were back at Conny's by around 3am. Though the night out could've gone better, the walk around the Rhein during the day was a bright spot and I was glad to have done it--in particular, getting to see inside the cathedral.

Day 2 in Cologne was decent, but relatively uneventful. We went out for lunch with Conny and and her friend Boris in a vibrant area of town with lots of restaurants and shopping. We walked around a bit after, found some ice cream, and eventually headed back to Conny's to get ready for the evening.

That night, we got to experience a really neat festival in Neuss called the Schützenfest, which carries on for about four days with various parades and parties in the streets. That particular night offered a massive parade of paper floats that were lit up and typically had some creative or humorous theme. It was very, very cool, and I was able to capture nearly every float with my phone's camera (left the proper camera at Conny's, unfortunately). Here are just a few good ones...

After the parade we walked a few blocks to where all the parties in the streets were going on and had a couple beers and chatted with some of Conny's friends (she used to live in Neuss) before calling it a night. I was glad to have experienced such a unique festival and have a glimpse at more typical life in Western Germany, but was also very eager to move on--to Hamburg!