Lina and I decided to stop in Germany for a few days before joining the rest of our gang in Turkey as we’d begged for a few extra days of leave. As it seemed as if it was going to be just me travelling solo for a while, I picked Germany since I know a bit of German, plus there are lots of plane connections between Germany and Turkey.
On arrival at the Frankfurt am Main airport it felt like we were on the planes for weeks – not just 26 hours between getting up and getting here. We took the midnight long haul to Frankfurt via Dubai and after not sleeping terribly much on the plane, we were a little dopey!
Luckily it seems like everyone speaks some English in Germany, so we got advice about trains etc at the airport. Phew! And it only took half an hour between deplaning and leaving the Frankfurt terminal! Huge difference in red tape between Australia and Europe.
The ICE train we took last night was amazing – there’s a display which occasionally tells the speed – at one point we were going 298k/h!! We arrived safely (very tiredly) at Ulli and Stephan’s place around 10pm – they have a fourth floor apartment in a gorgeous old building – very old by Australian standards, and it even has Dom glimpses! Ulli and Stephen are absolutely wonderful. They opened their home up to us simply because one of my friends is friends with them! Amazing hospitality. They gave us their attic room, right at the top of the house (you can imagine my fear of heights didn’t let me get terribly close to the windows).
Today we planned to wander around the city and get the kinks out of our legs after sitting for so long yesterday. Ulli and Stephan are only 10 minutes walk or so from central Koln, so it’s a good stretch of the legs. It’s quite cool here – 15C today, and cloudy with a tiny bit of almost-drizzle. Apparently it’s going to rain tomorrow so we’re thinking the museums might be the way to go – they aren’t open on Mondays anyway.
Today we went to the Kolner Dom – the cathedral. Wow, that’s certainly a cathedral!! Huge spiky towers and sculpture and stained glass windows and paintings. We climbed the 500 steps up to the lookout point, but unfortunately I couldn’t make it up all of the last open metal steps – way too open and high for my fear of heights to cope! Lina said she was a bit iffy on them too, and she’s usually fine with heights, so I didn’t feel too bad! What a view though! It certainly got the legs working!
We also walked around the shopping precinct today, which was great. So many of the same shops though, all close to each other! There were four of the same shoe shop that we saw on one street! There’s heaps
of bakeries though, at least one on each block, all selling pretzels and doughnuts and gorgeous looking bread… Very tempting, but I’ve managed to stay pretty much GF so far.
Two Weeks Away 