Month: March 2008

If it hadn’t been for my guidebook, I might have missed out on seeing Bonn. As it was, the day trip out of Cologne was worth it, just for the two museums I visited. The museum that drew me to Bonn, for Neil’s sake, was the Arithmeum. It advertises itself as the convergence of art…

I walked onto the wrong subway line on my way back to the center of town, and while the mistake delightfully took me past the Escher Street station, and bought me more interaction with Germans as I asked for directions back to the cathedral, I didn’t get back there until 11 or 12. And boy,…

My new hotel in the Mülheim district of Cologne happened to be near a store called Kaufland (literally “Shopping Land,”) and having heard a little about it from a flyer, I decided to check it out. It was definitely popular: its parking lot was nearly full of the mini-cars German like to drive, and there…

The German railway system has its own hotel booking service, which I used to book a 50-euro-a-night hotel within walking distance of Cologne’s main train station and the cathedral. It turned out to be a small hotel on top of a Bavarian restaurant & bar in Cologne’s Altstadt. In one way, it was a fantastic…

Thanks to the Cologne Card, I decided to check out the Cologne City Museum, and it was a delightful experience before I even got there. Even though the museum is close to the center of things, I had trouble finding it, and a lady decided to just lead me there. On the way, she told…

While in Heidelberg, I took in the movie Asterix at the Olympic Games. I love Asterix & Obelix, but they’re obscure over here, and I knew that movie would never make it into U.S. theatres, and if I ever downloaded it, it would likely only be available in its original French, not dubbed into German….

I had to walk in and out of the Cologne Cathedral two or three times before I felt I could psychologically take it on. Even so, I know I could only take in a fraction of all that it was, all that it is, and even though I took hundreds of pictures, in and outside…

On the train from Mannhein to Cologne, I had the pleasure of sitting next to a cargo-train driver who was on his way home, and then on to take a crash course in Dutch and Dutch train technology since his German company had just been bought by a French firm. He’d been born in Turkey,…

One of the things that had drawn me to Cologne was its chocolate museum, and I have to say, it did a great job in cheering me up on a day when I felt a little down It’s located right on the Altstadt side of the Rhein river in the closest thing to a castle…

  I was excited to visit the Roman-German Museum and it was the first thing (other than that incredible massive awesome cathedral) I went in to see when I arrived in Cologne. As I was in there, though, it all seemed rather redundant. As I was beginning to realize, all of Germany is a Roman-German…