nach köln!…und koblenz..?

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Friday was a loooong night of Stammtisch (see above picture, and below). Every week the Goethe-Institut kids go to a bar in Bonn Zentrum to chat (supposedly) in German, and just do what the Europeans do, meaning: drink a crapload of beer. The usual haunt is Salvator, a “München” bar that serves beer by the liter. I’ll let Pilar and her boyfriend demonstrate.

Afterwards a few of us decided we wanted to go out to the Diskos, but after being repeatedly rejected because they were “full” (meaning we had too many guys in our group, and not enough impressionable young girls), we just ended up walking around the city, making several stops at McDonalds for peeing/food/warmth/filet-o-fishes.

A lesson I learned after walking for three hours: my gray flats…not so good of an idea. Why?

Kaputt.

I fell out of bed around noon and decided it was time for my maiden voyage to Bonn’s sister city, Cologne (or Köln, as it’s called in German). We took the awesome regional train, for free, into the main train station. I was with my Swiss-Italian friend Andrea (pictured above), and a Croatian boy named Robert, who is a little crazy.

The Cologne Hauptbahnhof. The shadowy man in the foreground is Robert (making a typical Robert face

When we got to the city, the two guys were giving me shit about what we were going to do there. All I had wanted to see was the Dom, but they kept fighting me on it. These are the types of guys that would rather visit a mall than a museum. After fifteen minutes Andrea finally submitted, much to my surprise. We didn’t really know where we were heading to, but figured the train station was central, so we could just walk around the surrounding area and find stuff to see. When we walked out of the station door into the city, bam!, there it was in front of us. It seriously took my breath away. You always hear about European cathedrals, or see them depicted in action/romance movies, but unless you’ve been in the presence of one I don’t really think you can understand the sheer magnitude and beauty they possess.

The train station was built around it, so that when you exit your entire view is blocked by massive black stones. Apparently because of the industrial revolution and all the smog it caused in the city, the cathedral turned an odd black color.

We were able to walk inside it, and be all touristy. The architecture reminded me a lot of the National Cathedral that I lived across from in Washington D.C., except, you know, about 750 years older.

It has so much history, and for an American, it’s hard to grasp what these buildings have seen.

Here an American soldier reads a warning sign in front of a burnt out German tank on the steps in front of the Cathedral, where I sat only two days ago.

We walked around the rest of the city, which I can only describe as Newbury Street, x1000, and old as dirt. It was nice and all of that, but nothing in comparison to what I had just seen. The only interesting part was the massive mall (all designer clothing, mind you) that had a live DJ scratching in the Diesel Jeans section.

The three of us finally decided to leave around 4, and headed off again to the Hauptbahnhof. We went to the board to find our train, and I let Andrea take the lead. First mistake. We got on the train to “Bonn Beuel”, waited the normal 25 minutes expecting for our stop to come. Half an hour later, still nothing. Also fishy was the fact that we were following the Rhein River the entire time. We all swore that we didn’t see a river the entire ride there. But Andrea kept saying “Ich bin sicher, ich bin sicher. Kein Problem..” An hour later, no Bonn.

On the train, showing off the “trust me” face.

It became obvious that we were not heading towards Bonn, but instead, judging by the signs outside the train, towards a city called Koblenz. We had no map, and for all we knew, Koblenz was on the Swiss border. I painfully asked some women in German how far Koblenz was, only to have her answer me back in perfect English that we were about 4 stops away.

We arrive. I question how we ended up in some random city in Europe.

It was late, not even worth it to really look around, so we just hung there for about 15 minutes waiting for another train to come and bring us back home. On the way down, no one checked our ticket, which is common on trains in Europe, but as luck would have it that was not the case on the way back. The crazy conductor yelled at me in English, because obviously I was just a sleezy American trying to gank a free ride. She then charged me 15,00 Euros (the cost for my student train pass for all of Bonn and Cologne, for an entire year, by the way). As I watched the boys take down a few Berliners, I dreamt of strangling the Italian.

That old lady in the background was talking about me in German. She thought I couldn’t understand. Always hating on and underestimating the Americans.

Finally, 4 hours and 200 kilometers later, I was home. Well, in Bad-Godesberg. Good Enough.

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Tags: andrea, cathedral, cologne, getting in trouble, injury, koblenz, lost, pictures, robert, travel