Marc and I are in our hotel room, eating German chocolate and watching Star Wars (in German!) Our hotel is very nice, much nicer than the hotel last night in Amsterdam. The room, the lobby and the restaurant look like they were decorated by IKEA. Speaking of IKEA, we passed three of them today on the way from Amsterdam.

On the way here, we spent 1.5 hours in Cologne, Germany, and after that we spent 1.5 hours on a Rhine cruise. Other than that, we’ve been on the bus. It is a bit of a disappointment not to have very much time to explore the areas we’ve stopped in, but our short amount of time in Cologne was well spent. The tour bus dropped us off next to the Cologne cathedral, which took my breath away when I first saw it. Someone behind us commented that it needed to be cleaned, but its blackness somehow seemed appropriate. IT is so wickedly dark and gothic. I loved it.

For lunch, we grabbed some chicken doner, sorta like a German version of a gyro. They were GOOD. We ate lunch on some benches in front of the cathedral. Then we went inside. After lunch we watched a performance artist who had drawn a large crowd in front of the cathedral. He had a high wire about 8 feet off the ground, a tricycle, and three torches. He had pulled a female tourist out of the crowd and instructed her to toss the torches to him once he was on top of the high wire. You can sense the inherent drama, yes? We had to leave as he was standing on the wire, scolding the girl for nearly taking out an audience member. It was all very amusing and we were sorry to had to leave Cologne.

The Rhine cruise was a lot of fun. Barry advised us to try the local beer and wine sold on the cruise, and so I tried the wine and Marc tried the beer. We chatted with Sue and Joe along the way. The weather was clear and the countryside was very pretty, lots of green rolling hills with church steeples and lovely old buildings and the occasional castle dotting the landscape.

As I write this, Marc laughs outloud occasionally at some strange translation of Star Wars (Marc took German in high school). The part where Alderaan is destroyed, and Obi-Wan says “I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced,” is translated as “I heard a lot of voices screaming. It was very bad.”

Did I mention our first hotel dinner? It wasn’t bad. We had a yummy cream of broccolli soup, fish with a delicious sauce, some rice pilaf and veggies. I wish they would serve us local cuisine instead of pandering to us as tourists. During dinner we sat next to Dan and Alice, a couple from Toronto. Dan and I spent most of the time discussing our new cameras, which we both had purchased for the trip.

 

Go on the next part of the journey!