Cologne

Germany is country number 3 in 6 days and I made it here in one piece. I've quickly realised that travelling around the EU sucks if you want to get your passport stamped because it doesn't happen! So I'll just have to keep count in my head of all the stamps I should have.

My little cousin, Penny, has recently spent time in Germany and one of the spots she highly recommended was Cologne and the cathedral there. Luckily for me Arthur lives in Bonn, 25 minutes on the train from Cologne and as we arrived into Cologne the cathedral was first on our list of things to see.

Exterior

Interior

It was massive and the exterior and aspects of it reminded me of Notre-Dame although inside it was a lot lighter. We bought a pass to climb up the towers and it was a real hike. After a few steps my legs started to ache and I think this had a lot to do with all of the walking we did in Bruges. It was bit poorly organised because the steps were used for both people going up and down and it was a very narrow space. There were also lots of young children (6-10 year olds) running up and down who were obviously on a school trip but had got separated from their teachers along the way. There were also lots of small children crying and Arthur translated that they were scared of heights, poor little things.

What I found particularly interesting about this cathedral was how it had writing all over it. Visitors from all over the world have written their names on it and it was hard to find a space that hadn't been scribbled on. I'm not sure how that made me feel, a part of me thought it was disrespectful but another part of me thought it was pretty cool. Anyway that's one of the things I'll remember about this cathedral.

People have left their mark

I also got to see the bells and we pondered for a while as to how they got them up there because they were HUGE!

What a bell!

This is how I'd ring it

For lunch I had a German sausage (yummy) and then we headed to Bonn for a relaxing evening so we could rest our legs. Today we are going to check out some museums and I'm looking forward to see some German art!