Cologne - 15th July

Town Hall

Docked in the famous town of Cologne today and we have signed up for the guided walk. We joined the "gentle walk" as Ros's knee has been giving her grief. First building we saw was the impressive Town Hall, but as there was a fireworks festival scheduled for this evening, this was the best shot I could get of it, between various vendor's stalls. The red fruh stall sells beer as do countless others.

Tall narrow buildings

Cologne, like many other German cities, prefer these tall, narrow buildings. There are no lifts in these buildings and the stairs are so steep and narrow, most houses have a pillar sticking out of the roof with a hook on it, and it is used to raise furniture up to the floor in question and taken in through the windows, rather than try to navigate those narrow stairs. Bright colours are the order of the day.

Lollies galore

It's traditional when the fireworks are held that lollies are popular and from the picture on the right, they are very popular. There were so many varieties I was very tempted but with so much food on the ship, I resisted.

Cobblestones

All European cities and towns have these infernal cobblestones which can be hard on the feet if you haven't got comfortable shoes on. In Belgium in 2008, the walk across cobblestones from the railway station to our hotel, a kilometer or so, totally wrecked the wheels on our carry on luggage, they were never the same after that.

Roman floor mural

On our tour, we passed the Roman museum and I took this picture through the glass of a Roman floor mural uncovered during construction of the museum. It is almost completely intact and would have been the floor of a high-class person, such as a senator or general. Sorry about the quality, the reflections were terrible and we didn't have time to go into the museum proper.

Cologne Cathedral

No tour of Cologne would be complete without a visit to the famous cathedral there. It is an awesome sight and took 600 years to build. The day we were there they were holding the funeral for the Archbishop so we couldn't go inside because of all the dignitaries there. Nevertheless, the sights from outside were spectacular. The cathedral is constantly undergoing maintenance as the stone gets eaten up by the atmospheric pollution and you can no doubt see the black stains on the stone, in contrast to the white cleaned stone.

To give you some idea how tall this building is, see the top finials on the two spires? Then have a look at the next picture to see how big they really are.

Cathedral finial

This is the actual size of the finials on top of the two towers. It will hopefully give you some idea of the scale of this building.

I'm writing this blog in Boston, the last two days of the tour were so hectic I didn't have a chance to write, then Monday was spent all day flying.