Ausflug Went to Cologne, Aachen and Luxembourg this weekend with Eduardo, Ignacio and Steffi. I only have the pictures from Cologne ready today. Tourism in Köln is dominated by the Cathedral (or Dom) and the museums. The cathedral was only slightly damaged in the bombing, which when you see what happened to the rest of Cologne is some kind of miracle. Most of the other old churches had to be rebuilt from scratch, and feel eerily empty. The Dom itself is huge and spectacular - the pictures I took don't do it justice, but it's hard to capture the sense of history and wonder you have inside with a couple of photos. There was some sort of church there from 800AD, then they built the large cathedral over several hundred years, starting from when a skiled Milanese businessman sold the archbishop of Cologne the "bones of the Magi" in 1200ish.

Cologne was an old roman town, and you can see roman ruins in various places, excavated under the cathedral and some of the other churches. The displays weren't all that great though and they didn't really make it easy to picture what the buidlings might have actually have been like.

The modern art museum was a lot of fun, though i thought they'd chosen kind of unwisely from the very recent stuff. The Max Ernst I took a picture of was probably my favourite, though there were some really excellent Picasso pieces as well.

Kölsch Cologne has its own variety of beer, called Kölsch, a sort of dry, quite bitter, and not so fizzy pilsner. It's served in small glasses, because when it gets warm and loses its head it's not considered drinkable. It's quite ok, though having to order another every 3 mouthfulls is inconvenient, particularly given the very offhand and inattentive service we got everywhere in Cologne. After one drink in a bar with an automatic accordian-playing doll that was driving us nuts, we went to a famousish jazz pub on the Buttermarkt. It was lots of fun in there. The band was a lot of old gents playing sort of ragtime or trad jazz numbers, and a few people were dancing, including an entertaining old chap who snagged Steffi on her way to the ladies and made her dance for the rest of the song.

Hostel Backpacker hostels are amazingly well equipped these days compared to when I went interrailing, they all have bars and internet access and the like. Ours was well up to scratch, though of course it had its quirky guests, such as the Chinese chap on the first night who started rummaging through our food and eventually opened a tin of fish before we pointed out it was our stuff. Of course we let him have the fish, then the next day he gave us a pear in a bizarre little ceremony in the bedroom. On Saturday night I was harrangued by a Kiwi on two subjects: first, that no more people should move to New Zealand as it is full, and that people should stop dropping cigarette ends on the street since they end up in the sea. Naturally I had no disagreements with him about this, but that didn't stop him giving me the full monte about it. Eventually I skillfully steered him onto the subject of The Datsuns, a band from NZ that he fortunately also liked, and things became more amicable.

I'll stick up the pictures from Aachen (featuring the tomb of Chalemagne, another spectacular cathedral, and other rainy town photos) and Luxembourg (inc. a man who maches up and down all day, a statue of a horse and the second british shop of the weekend) tomorrow.