Cologne, or the 4711
I don’t plan much out when I travel. I just get these ideas in my head of how I’m going to accomplish something, and then when I get to where I think I’m going, I try to put my lack of plans into action. It’s not that I don’t think planning is a good idea. There’s been times in my life when I’ve planned out every detail of my life to within a five minute window of accuracy. Some things have to be planned, for example, job interviews, college applications, movers (especially overseas), weddings, etc. (Although truth be told, I’ve been known to read up on the company I’m interviewing with twenty minutes before walking into the building, as well as overnighting my college application package the day before it was due. I can find a way to do nearly everything at the last minute - a habit I sometimes care to break and sometimes don’t.)
Recently I’ve discovered that while planning will most likely ensure that you see everything you want to see, I’m not sure it will actually guarantee that you experience everything you want to (or don’t yet know that you want to) experience. Case in point: Canada. When I drove across Canada I didn’t even have a tour book, just a set of maps that I probably wouldn’t even have had had Bee not, in her infinite wisdom, gone to AAA to retrieve for me a few weeks before I left. (The maps, by the way, turned out to be the smartest thing in my possession aside from the umbrella.) The ease with which I’m distracted from the task at hand combined with a tour book suggesting various distractions would have, I am certain, had my thirty days expiring before I even got across British Columbia, and I would never even have met anyone along the way.
I can stick to a travel schedule decently. After spending an extra day in Berlin to visit Sansoucci down in Potsdam, I tore back to the Berlin Hauptbahnhof and asked to be put on the next train to Cologne, a direct, high-speed trek across the middle part of Germany. I’ve ridden a couple fast trains in Switzerland (they tilt around turns, which is really cool), but nothing like this one. This is the kind of train where you notice you’re starting to have difficulty observing the passing scenery and then you look up and the LED scrolling display in your car says the train is going 200 km/h. Now before you go into that spiel about how the trains in Japan go 300 km/h, let me point out that I think the train I ride once in a while in the San Francisco bay area goes at most, 50 mph, but most of the time is probably going around 30 mph while it stops and starts every five minutes at stations. I think even Amtrak only goes 70 or 80 mph, which is reduced to about 0 mph every time the damn train stops for seven hours in the middle of nowhere for no reason that anyone can discern.
Trains in Europe are cool for a lot of other reasons. First, they’re usually cheaper than flying (though not always), you almost always get several seats to yourself, you can bring all the food and drink onboard that you want, there are no baggage restrictions so if you want to schlep those three steins you bought along with all that chocolate, cheese, and sausage, it’s simply up to you to find a way to get all that crap up the stairs. I’ve also managed to have some cutesy conversations with train conductors trying to explain to me in broken English why my ticket isn’t valid for this leg of my journey and how I owe an extra €7 or what not, and me sweetly replying “Entschuldigung!” (sorry!) “I thought this was the train to Bern!” to get out of the huge fine part. So far, it’s worked, although yeah, I don’t actually get on the wrong train on purpose.
Cologne is a place Sleeper suggested when I first became interested in this week long Germany-by-train excursion, also suggested by him. My book didn’t say much about it, other than there’s a big Dom (cathedral) there, just like it seems like there is in every other pre-war city in Germany. Big Dom, however, is a bit of an understatement. When I finally arrived in Cologne late that evening, I strode out of the train station dragging my bumping green suitcase behind me, right into a plaza where the cathedral literally appeared, as if to say DOM. “Holy crap!” I said out loud. Some tourists carefully and quickly walked around me when I stopped short to talk to myself at the station entrance. The Dom is beyond big. To use Bee’s favorite non-term, it’s “ginormous,” and it’s also right in your face. Outside the modern, glass and steel-roofed Hauptbahnhof is this 1248 (completed in 1880) structure rising above the rest of the city, the surrounding buildings crowded around it but also discreetly respecting its space. It was misty and overcast that evening, and when I went to visit the cathedral the next day it was even more impressive under light blue skies.
The Cologne Dom has seen all kinds of miracles and sadness. In 1945 when the city was bombed to smithereens during WWII, the Dom escaped with only a few scratches, virtually the only building left standing amidst a landscape of destruction. The city still sells sepia-toned aerial photographs of the aftermath, depicting a blackened but proud cathedral towering above still smoldering ruins, and most strikingly, the twisted and sheared remnants of the mostly sunken Hohenzollern bridge, destroyed above the Rhine right across from the spared cathedral. The locals deemed it a miracle of God (it was a cathedral, after all) since it had literally rained bombs and shrapnel all around it, and nary a spire was rendered askew after the barrage. A little research, however, revealed that Allied air forces often left large, unique buildings intact in German cities for use as landmarks to aid in hitting the correct targets. Yeah, I’m not religious and I still like the first story better too.
The cathedral is also famous for a golden sarcophagus that supposedly contains the ashes of the Three Wise Men. That’s the right, the guys who brought the gold, frankincense, and myrrh. I tried photographing this but it was behind plexiglass and bars so it didn’t come out too well. I’m not actually sure how you’d get away with carting off a golden sarcophagus and not have anyone notice (maybe it would fit in the bike car on the train?), but apparently anything’s possible around here.
Outside the Dom in the plaza is your regular assortment of childhood nightmares, people with their faces painted gold and silver and dressed as the Archbishop of Canterbury or Ben Franklin or the Statue of Liberty, and all standing as still as they can or making small, robotic movements. I don’t really get this. At Pier 39 in San Francisco, you have these people too, except they actually seem to be good at what they do, like that guy with the kazoo in his mouth who pretends to be a robot. Was the Statue of Liberty really the only costume left when this woman went to the Dress-Like-a-Statue store? What about Ben Franklin? Why doesn’t any of this make sense? Sometimes there are people with actual talent. There was a street artist drawing an enormous chalk mural on the plaza. I loved his unicorn constellation (it was a unicorn after all, and some part of me is still 9 years old), although there was something a little troubling about the way he’d mumble “Danke” when a kid came up and threw some coins in his bucket, his cigarette stuck to his lower lip as he uttered his mechanical gratitude.
It was Sunday in Cologne, which meant museum day there and everywhere in Europe. With the H&Ms all closed what else was I going to do? Museum Ludwig next to the Dom boasted a Lichenstein exhibit that I had to check out (I’m considering a bit of pop art for the Christmas cards this year, although as usual I’m sure it’s way ambitious for a project that I’ll probably start two weeks before the holidays). The museum was also full of incomprehensible and sometimes disturbing modern art. Yes, I’ve been to SF MOMA and a few other modern art museums, and I’ll admit, I still don’t really get it, even when I think I’ve come up with a conceivably passable interpretation. It’s like that music that’s a bunch of static and noise and clanging of garbage can lids together, or that type of dance where everyone is just randomly leaping and rolling around to the aforementioned music, or that literature that is like, oh I don’t know, Hemingway. Ok, I’ll stop shitting on Hemingway. After all, he was suicidally profound, and on some macabre level I can still appreciate that.
The highlight of Cologne by far is the Lindt & Sprüngli chocolate museum. I know, what’s the Lindt & Sprüngli chocoloate museum doing in Germany? If it should be anywhere, it should be in Switzerland. There is in fact, one right outside of Zurich, but the oompah loompahs don’t give interviews and the public isn’t allowed on that boat that goes down the chocolate river, from what I hear. But this museum - ah - this museum has an entire chocolate factory inside it, running, squirting out chocolate into plastic molds and baking them and sending them flying down conveyor belts to be upturned and picked up with suction by large mechanized arms and wrapped adeptly in gold foil by the final machine that then spits them out into perfectly counted plastic bags. You can walk through this factory and watch the chocolate churning through huge paddlewheels, as well as perfectly round truffles making their way through a machine that drizzles matching chocolate stripes over each ball. There’s even a chocolate fountain at the end of the museum, and not the kind you see at weddings. This is a veritable tree of foil-covered cocoa beans, with a swirling pool of chocolate at the base. A white-clad woman with a chef’s hat dips wafers in this ambrosia and will hand them to you for free if you’re crazy enough to get through the crowd. Swiss chocolate is a bit of a rock concert in Europe, in case you weren’t aware.
The rest of the museum is filled with shrines to Zürich Sprüngli and Nutella, old chocolate vending machines, chocolate art and historic wrappers, molds, serving dishes, and everything else you could possibly dream about chocolate. Check out the whole Cologne gallery for more.
I ended up staying in the city for two days, to see the chocolate museum and to walk the bridges. When I crossed back over the Rhine via the Hohenzollern, there was an impromptu concert going on in the park behind the Dom. Well, it was as impromptu as a concert can be where the band’s dragged a couch out with them to sit on while they play. I was about to pass by, thinking these were just more street performers, when the woman started to sing with this ridiculously wicked voice. I hid partially behind a tree and watched, admiring. She was gorgeous to boot, or at least, my definition of gorgeous. Short, curly brown hair, a dark, middle eastern look, tattoos and piercings and a casual style. As Kiwi said one day, “Chicks who can sing and play the guitar are always hot.” Maybe that’s true. Then I found out she’s half Chinese, to which he replied later, “Well obviously, that’s why she’s so awesome.”
Turns out her name is Yen, and she already has an album out, one of those albums that if you try to buy on Amazon is absurdly overpriced as an “import.” I got it for €15 along with the entire band’s signature on the CD insert. Her melodies are catchy, even if her lyrics are patently boring. Maybe something was lost in translation, I don’t know. She sings in English but she speaks fluent German to the crowd, which seems to be her native tongue.
Twenty feet from this serendipitous concert was an unexpected flea market. It seems that in Europe, when people have flea markets, they don’t necessarily sell stuff imported from China and Bangladesh, or crafts they’ve created on their own. There’s some of this, sure, but a lot of it appears to be crap they’ve gathered from the furthest reaches of their attic and in every pantry drawer and under carpet hiding place. It’s like a neighborhood garage sale where everyone’s trying to peddle their grandmothers’ ugly flowered silverware and armless dolls and stuff that looks old but might just have been dragged around in the dirt for ten minutes.
The good thing is that most of the stuff is priced rightly so. I even got a ring for €4. It has a little stone inlaid mountain, beach, and sun scene that reminds me of California, as well as a grossly out of proportion flying bird that appears to be a sea pteradactyl. Hey, whaddya want for €4. I was two-thirds of the way through this huge market when the heavy clouds moved in aggressively over the river, the wind came up, and everyone started scrambling to take down their tents and hide all their wares. Everyone that is, except the Kartoffelpuffer stand. They were frying up Kartoffelpuffer and laughing in the face of the storm. I think Kartoffelpuffer makes you do this. It’s this grated, smashed flat, potato pancake type thing. Germanic countries have lots of potato pancake type things with different names, but Kartoffelpuffer is special. It’s deep fried, and the smashed flat grated shape seems to have the effect of trapping as much oil as possible within the weave. This leaves you with some kind of potato-grease-pancake, and for an extra 25¢ you can usually have it slathered “mit Apfelmus” (with apple sauce). Now, I’m not saying that you’re going to feel good after you’ve eaten it, but you’ll certainly feel good while you’re eating it. Kartoffelpuffer - the culinary one-night stand.
By the way… if you’re wondering if Cologne sells cologne, they do. It’s actually called “Cologne,” but I guess this was confusing as it was later named 4711, the number of the building in which the smelly stuff is sold.
