Europe 2007

I wanted to stay awake as long as i could after the flight to try and push my bodyblock forwards to avoid jetlag, so we went out for a bit of a walk and a drink around town, was very interesting for the first time catching the city underground train and doing things the way the locals in Nippes/Cologne do it, interesting that around here drinking is no problem and quite a lot of people buy long necks of beer to drink on the train as a traveller, but it is no issue and everyone has a good time, after a while my vision started to look like the following picture from the lack of sleep so after a couple of heavy-metal orientated bars where i dropped off some flyers for tshirt slayer it was decided that sleep was a very good idea.



In the morning had an excellent breakfast, david and christines place is very nice, very fresh interior you would not pick it from the street.

if you turn your head sideways this is a view out the back window

had breakfast and then it was decided we should take a walk to the cathedral and do the tourist walk to the top and the guided tour, on the way is the usual german bakeries, phone shops, internet cafe's etc, however most things are closed on sunday's, except if you're turkish then you live and work in your kebap shop which is normally always open.

On the way david discovers an internet payphone both, very exciting.

Some more oldschool church type things

Most of the streets around these parts are consumed by 5 or 6 story high residential buildings, usually with a cathedral of some sort in the background

On the way to the cathedral we pass thru cologne's older city wall boundaries via this gate, most of the German towns apparently are layed out where the streets form rings around the centre, i guess this goes back to ye olde medieval times where you could have a gate as the entrance.
This is one nuesser strasse heading into the old town part before Ebertplatz

Once in the cathedral we took on the guided tour and then the dizzying walk to the top of the of the spires, there was lots of graffiti on the way up, the view was pretty awesome and it was pretty fullon to be inside such a building.

After the tour we watched some presentation about the history of this place, while waiting for this to begin i noticed the local homeless queuing up at a good give-away type arrangement, they seemed pretty amicable.

Then we walked up the stairs which took a long time and i was pretty dizzy by the end of it from going in circles, but it was well worth it.

Lots of graffiti up the top but looked interesting anyway



This is looking down onto a 6 or 7 story building, yeh, up a fair way.

On the way back we stopped at a "beer-hall" which is a very old traditional place for drinking and eating at, they serve the local kolsch type beer and really awesome food that goes back to viking days, i was not super hungry so we just ordered some blutwurst (blood sausage) with onion, mustard and bread, it was actually really really nice.


inside the beer hall..

After this we went for a walk along the rhine river, it flows very fast and carries the occasional shipping vessel and lots of fairies for shunting tourists about, the water quality apparently is very very good but you do not swim in it due to the strong current, the koln dom (cologne cathedral) dominates the skyline from all sorts of places, this is taken from the rhine river

People do like to fish here too..

There was some fleamarkets along here too, they had some old signs, i should have bought this one, it was pretty cool.

After this i caught up with anna for a couple of hours who stayed at glitch with one of her friends (verena) a couple of years ago.

And then it was back to david's for dinner, bratwurst! yummo