5:30 AM is far too early to be getting up, it's dark, it's cold and there are buses filled with glassy eyed zombies shuffling unsteadily past the heavily armoured drivers. It is not for nothing that I risk travel under these conditions but today rather travelling to the hell on Earth that is Derby ( not strictly true I know; hell is probably more exciting ) I was setting off for Cologne - or Koln as the Germans insist on calling it.
Whilst hanging around the New Street Station attempting to communicate with the serving machines crouching moronically behind their counter that I preferred my tea with sugar and milk Phil and Richard appeared and we dashed off to catch our train to the airport. I was quite surprised and indeed impressed that none of us were late and that barring serious rail crashes or accidental falls from platforms we were in good time for the train.
Check in was a breeze but it appeared that the plane was delayed for some reason which meant we could have some breakfast.
Once on the plane everything appeared to be in place for a swift take off until a large bang followed by all the cabin lights turning off turned into a lengthy wait - the silence in the plane broken only by nervous giggles and crying from some of the more nervous passengers. Personally I understand that planes are fantastically complicated but almost perfectly safe vehicles and the provided they are operated by a competent and skilled staff the chances of anything going wrong are very slight. The tannoy announced that the recent power cut we may have noticed was caused by "... someone pulling out a power cable they really shouldn't have and power would, hopefully, soon be restored".
Outside my window what I took to the be the power restoration team were manoeuvring a large vehicle with a big chunky cable, lot's of switches and dials and two large exhaust pipes into position next to the wing, having made a slight adjustment to avoid hitting the engine with their back end a team of very young looking men in overalls leapt out and began to drag the cable under the plane. Those not engaged in the enthusiastic cable pulling huddled around the dials and switches where they seemed to hold some kind of animated discussion.
One of the braver technicians reached out confidently and pulled some levers and looked confidently at one the dials which I could see did not move. His companion pointed at the dial next to it ( which also hadn't moved ) and tapped it whilst the original switch puller scratched his head. They tried pulling the switch again and again nothing obvious happened and were increasingly frantically pushing the switch back and forth when one of the cable pullers returned and elbowed his way to the control panel where he pressed a button the other two hadn't paid any attention to. There was some more frantic scanning of dials but nothing obvious had happened, then moving as one unit the entire huddle of technicians began pressing different buttons and pulling switches. This went on for some time. Eventually large clouds of smoke began to pour from the machines exhausts and the technicians high fived each other and stood back whilst the smoke rapidly enveloped them and cut off my view of the machine. Some time later the plane made a safe take off and delivered us safely to Cologne.
We managed to get into the general vicinity of the hotel easily enough on the very efficient tram network but unfortunately I had only printed out a map showing the hotel as large circle encompassing several streets and parks with no road names showing on it. A series of encounters with helpful Germans, shop keepers and patrons of local gyms led us to a 2min taxi ride to the place our hotel was actually located. In fairness we all agreed that the map was wrong and we had only gone where it indicated.
The hotel ( Hotel Westerner Hof ) was nice and the room was airy and pleasant with a nice fresh smell but we had no time to languish in hotels and set out immediately for the town centre where all the action was sure to be.
Walking back out of the hotel we discovered we were around a 5min walk from the tram and underground station ( transport node ) we had recently set off from. We were on the opposite side of the river from the main town centre in Cologne so our tram took us across a bridge spanning the Rhine. The river is really very wide and at all times you can see at least 3 container barges plying it's waters. The bridge was destroyed during the War ( along with most of Cologne ) but obviously we didn't mention that too often.
Seemingly the only thing not destroyed in Cologne was the massive Cathedral - Koln Dom and that is something of a miracle, or perhaps a facet of the Cathedrals sheer immensity, considering it took a number of direct hits. Cologne has the dubious honour of being the first German city to fall victim to the allies 1000 bomber raids, in fact only 850 or so bombers got through but this in a 90 minute period which must surely have been 90 minutes of pure hell for the people in the city. The air crews did apparently do their best not to hit the Cathedral despite levelling practically everything else to the ground through a combination of pure explosives and the devastating firestorms created by concentrating the bombing into such a small time frame.
The Cathedral is the first thing which you can see on exiting from the train station, it towers over modern Cologne and must have towered even more impressively over medieval Cologne when it was conceived and constructed. I have never seen anything so huge ( apart from maybe the odd mountain or two ) and certainly not anything built from stone and sporting such an array of ornamentation and gargoyles.
As fascinating as the Cathedral was it was wasn't doing anything to satisfy our increasing hunger so we set off for the river and a walk into the older part of town to find a nice restaurant. Our journey was interrupted by a little dog dressed as a policeman riding around on a mini police scooter. He gave us a good look over but concluded we didn't prove too much of a danger to the residents and let us continue on our way unmolested.
We examined a number of restaurants and bars and ended up in what might have been a traditional Germanic drinking hall ( in the same way O'Neils is a traditional Irish pub experience ) but we were a little unsure of how to order food or if indeed that option was available to us. Whilst spying out the land we sampled our first glass of Koelsch.
Koelsch is the native Cologne drink brewed by a dozen breweries in the cities and available universally in pubs, bars and restaraunts in small glasses. Rumour had it that should your glass ever empty it will be refilled by observant staff within the second and in general this is what we experienced. For lager Koelsch is pleasingly drinkable.
We ate a variety of meat based dishes and headed out into the town to sample some more bars in a scouting mission for the arrival of the others on Friday.
The internet told me that the best places to drink were on the ring road which is unfortunately a good half hour walk from the river and the cathedral. Most of this walk was down what has to be the worlds largest shopping street, all of it looked like a cross between New Street & Corporation Street in town and all of it began to become increasingly dull as we trudged down it. What is worse is that all these shops didn't leave any room for pubs so it was with some relief when we came across the first pub outside the shopping zone and we entered eagerly and sat down to await our Koelsch.
The barman was in fact some psychotic American actor named Bussey, with an evil glint in his eye he established we wanted 3 beers which he swiftly slammed down in front of us. "Drink well boys, drink !" he roared as he retired behind his bar to watch our progress. Phil & Rich were downing their beers like they were going out of fashion, the second they finished and their empty glasses hit the table the evil Bussey was summoned from his lair "So slow boys ! Drink ! Faster" he yelled fixing me with a malignant glare. "You have not finished, you must drink ! Drink !" he screamed at which I did my best to match the pace of the other two.
Eventually we were released and moved on around a number of bars on the ring road.
Comments
Post new comment