The picture above is of the Dom Cathedral. This thing is HUGE. The picture cannot say enough. Cologne has a lot of Roman cathedrals that are pint-sized versions of the Dom all over the city. There isn’t much architecture. However, I did take the tour of the chocolate museum (Schokolademuseum) which teaches you how to get from the cocoa plant to the chocolate aphrodisiac we all have grown to love. The picture below is of a young girl in Honduras (where a lot of cocoa is harvested) that I thought was funny for some reason. She doesn’t look too happy. Maybe she didn’t get her World Outreach Program support check…or maybe she didn’t get her share of chocolate. Who knows. Haha.
Next comes the highlight of this trip. On my way back to my hotel after a day of sightseeing, I stop at a random Mexican-ish restaurant to grab some dinner. I sit outside, enjoying a “Kölsch,” and do my usual people-watching antics. I look over to my right and hear two guys speaking Chicagoan English. One of them then gave me the ‘what up’ nod. The next thing I know is that I am pulling up a chair and engaged in full conversation about Europe, Chicago, and German beer-drinking. It turns out that these guys were stationed in the middle-of-nowhere Germany in the Air Force and were in Cologne for the weekend. After dinner, I ended up going out to Friensenplatz (bar/club area) with these guys. I’m going to make it a point to say that people in the Air Force are huge and make me look very very small. They are so large, that the bouncers at atleast 4-5 clubs and bars in Cologne refused to let us into their establishments solely because one of them was ‘too big’ and would cause trouble if he got too drunk. Finally we found a few places to go and cause mayhem. I paid for it big time the next day.
What comes out of this is the age-old conclusion: You do some pretty interesting things while traveling and meet some pretty cool people too. But hey, atleast I can tell people that I have another place to go when I go back to Germany.
In the coming weekends I am heading to the states (ATL and MIA) for a work ‘furlough.’ Then it’s back to Rotterdam for who knows how long…so don’t ask how long I’ll be here.
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