Europe 2007

Finally! After a month or two of reading my lonely planet guide to germany and quite a few stalled attempts at learning german I found myself standing infront of the cologne cathedral


Emirates did not mention a stop over in Singapore, but turned out to be a good one to break the first leg of the flight up for half an hour.

The flight itself was pretty smooth however I did notice that this aeroplane was a pretty old model, not really what i expected from emirates air, seats were a bit crap and the LCD's in the in-flight entertainment kept crapping out, but they got me there in the end, once we changed at Dubai we were in a pretty new plane and it was a lot more comfortable. Flight overall very smooth and not much turbulence, food was EXCELLENT and always seemed to be on offer.

Dubai is one very very very dry place, I would not like to be stuck here for too long, apparently they have been "building" their airport for a couple of years and it is still not finished, had to get a taxi-bus to the plane on the way out and stand about on the tarmac for a few minutes, but nothing too bad.

One thing i did notice is that for all the gold trimmings and fancy new extentions they forgot to provide travellers with one pretty obvious requirement - the current time - there were expensive sports cars in the duty free section, but the only clock in the whole building was an analogue clock hanging about the information desk that "stylishly" showed the time in 6 hour increments, they had nice LCD boards on the boarding gates but they just said which flight number it was for, there was no time till departure, current time, etc,

I think almost 23 hours later, arrived in frankfurt, got the fast ICE train to cologne where i met up with david who stayed at glitch bar for sometime a few years ago, david and christine are really cool people, david has been showing me around cologne (koln) for a week or so until we goto the Wacken heavy metal festival at the end of the week.

The cologne hauptbanhof (central station) flanks the world famous cologne catherdral this is a seriously impressive structure, very striking to see this when you get off the train.