Running & Reading in Rennes: Cologne, or, Like the Romans, We Didn't Cross the Rhine

OK, first, to be fair, the Romans did cross the Rhine. They just tended not to stay across for very long and they treated the Rhine as the border between the empire and the barbarians of the German forests.

Breakfast on the train!

Anyway, the day after our day-trip to Bruges, Lisa and I bade farewell to Nathaniel and Maria and took a morning train from Brussels to Cologne, Germany. We had first-class seats on this one because when I bought the tickets, the first-class seats were cheaper than second-class. Perhaps it's because this was an international train (running from Paris to Brussels to Cologne), but our first-class service was significantly better on this train than on French trains (although we have very limited experience with first-class trains in France). We were served complimentary breakfast in our seats, just like a plane! Also, there was free WiFi, but since we didn't bring a computer, it wasn't much use to us.

Train station with cathedral in the background.

The train to Cologne took about two hours. The station is very conveniently located right next to the cathedral; as soon as you walk out, you see it. We didn't spend a lot of time admiring it from the outside because we wanted to get our city map from the tourist office across the street. Unfortunately, unlike in France, we had to buy the map, just as we did in Brussels and Bruges and many places in the UK. I guess these northern European countries are always trying to make a buck off you!

The cathedral was so large from the side that even Lisa's
wide-angle lens couldn't capture it all.

We then walked around the outside of the cathedral. The cathedral was begun in 1248 and left unfinished in 1473, but work started again under the German Empire in the 19th-century and the whole thing was finished in 1880. Although it sustained over seventy bomb hits from Allied planes in World War II, it didn't collapse. There's a theory that one reason it wasn't destroyed by the Allies is because the two huge towers (515 feet tall!) served as a useful navigational landmark for bombers flying deep into Germany near the end of the war. It's the largest Gothic church in northern Europe and has the largest facade of any church in the world. There's not much external sculpture, unlike French Gothic cathedrals, but the size is what makes it so impressive. The towers are stepped and recessed, constantly pulling your eye upwards and emphasizing their height. The mass of stone is truly overwhelming.

Dionysus mosaic in the Roman-Germanic Museum.

Next to the cathedral is the Römisch-Germanisches (Roman-Germanic) Museum. Cologne was originally founded as a Roman veterans' colony (hence the modern name of the city) on the west bank of the Rhine River so there's a lot of Roman remains from the area, most housed in this museum. It, too, is overwhelming, but in a different way from the cathedral - there's just so much stuff in the museum and it's not well-signed in English nor is there any kind of comprehensive organization of the material. So it was just lots of pottery and jewelry and funeral monuments to look at. The highlights for me were a couple of floor mosaics found in the course of archaeological work in Cologne and a special exhibit of Greek statues and vases from the classical museum in Berlin. I'm disappointed we won't make it to Berlin to see the museum, so I was very happy to see part of the collection elsewhere!

You can see why it took three hours!

We spent almost three hours in the museum then headed to our hotel (just on the other side of the train station from the cathedral) to drop off our bags, stopping off for a pretzel (in lieu of lunch) inside the train station. After resting in the hotel for a bit, we decided to check out the Schnütgen Museum, Cologne's medieval art museum. To get there, we walked though some of the pedestrian-only areas of the "old city," although since most of the city was leveled in World War II, there very little of the town that pre-dates the 1950s, but we did pass some old buildings surrounded the old market places, like the medieval city-council building.

Medieval city-council building.

St. Cecilia's Church.

The medieval museum itself was good, with lots of medieval stained glass, vestments, serving pieces, ivory and wood carvings, and illuminated manuscripts. The central part of it was located in the deconsecrated 11th-century St. Cecilia's church. It was a very creative use of space because the artifacts followed the lines of the church and, in some cases, the original uses of the space. For example, the gold and silver was located in the old sacristy, a large Bible was placed where the altar would have been, and carvings dealing with the theme of death were placed in the crypt. (Unfortunately, pictures weren't allowed inside, so we can't show you what it looks like.) It was an interesting place and the signage was much better than the Roman-Germanic Museum!

Aaron, not crossing the river.

After the museum, we walked towards the Rhine and went out onto the Deutzer Brücke bridge over the Rhine (but again, we didn't cross the river!) and then back up to the cathedral to go inside. The square around the cathedral was unbelievably windy. Lisa speculated that the temperature difference between the cathedral (a huge mass of stone that doesn't warm up very easily) and the external air might cause the wind since it wasn't really windy anywhere else in Cologne. I think the large open area around the cathedral has something to do with it, too. The inside is almost as overwhelming as the outside, largely because of the height: 142.2 feet, three feet taller than the cathedral in Amiens. The aisles and nave also felt narrower than the cathedrals we've seen in France. I don't know if they actually are, but it would make sense. To build a cathedral that tall, you would need to keep the inside narrow to support the height. We couldn't walk around the ambulatory so we ended up not spending a whole lot of time in there. Plus, it was getting dark, so it was hard to see much inside.

Cathedral interior with people in motion.

Dinner!

We left the cathedral and walked back into the old town for dinner. We went to a beer hall / brewery that seemed like a pretty local kind of place. I tried the local Cologne beer, kölsch, and we had our fill of good German food - sauerkraut, mashed potatoes, spaetzle, and blutwurst (for me, not Lisa!). The spaetzle Lisa had was more like the richest, cheesiest, homemade mac 'n' cheese she's ever had. There were a couple of large groups of German men in there, too, who ordered several of the big 5-liter columns of beer. They were having a good, raucous time until their food came. Then they were silent as they chowed down!

We're not really sure why Lisa took
such crooked pictures this week.

On the way back to the hotel, we stopped to get some pictures of the cathedral at night before turning in. The next morning, we had a fantastic German-style breakfast in the hotel: cold cuts, cheese, yogurt, cereal, bread, jam, cucumbers, tomatoes, coffee, and juice. And all for five euros a piece - easily the largest and cheapest hotel breakfast we've yet had in Europe! After that, we went back to the cathedral to see the inside in the daylight. We got there right as the sun was coming through the windows behind the altar and it was very pretty. Unfortunately, we could only spend about 30 minutes inside before we had to walk across the square to the train station to catch our 8:44 train to Paris, the last stop on our week-long tour. It was rather disappointing to spend less than 24 hours in Germany and Cologne, but I'd say we packed quite a bit in during our time there!