Oh, duh: Cologne

December 2011 took us to Cologne for Christkindlmarkts and gluhwein and all that festive jazz.

The main feature of Cologne is its cathedral (or "Dom"). Despite being surrounded by a major station, a large bridge and various buildings, all of which were flattened in the war, the Dom survived more or less unscathed. Cologne has an "old town" but it's not all that old so the Dom is the most picturesque thing there.  Fortunately it's huge and you see it from more or less anywhere.

Yep, still huge at night.

You can find out how huge it is by climbing the 580-odd steps to the top, pausing halfway to admire the bells.

And then the rest of the way up.  Most of it is a fairly small spiral staircase used for both ascent and descent.  So you'd better not mind other people.  One guy was carrying his wheely suitcase all the way to the top and back.

Nice view from the top, mind.

Detail of the view of the top from the bottom.

Cologne is famous for its Christmas markets.  Seven of them this year. Most of them are nice.  One of them is  on a cruise boat on the river, charges EUR2 entry, and is full of tat.  So I think six would have been fine.  They get pretty busy, especially the one by the Dom (below).

Cologne has a few excellent museums. The East Asian Art Museum particularly appealed to me - most of its space was given open to a temporary exhibition on Japanese painting 1400-1900, which was full of great stuff (including a fantastic double screen painting of a dragon and a tiger that took me back to Kyoto).

The huge modern art museum, Museum Ludwig, is pretty good too (esp if you're a fan of Warhol and Lichtenstein).

 And I didn't know Cologne used to be a Roman town (I must have missed that volume of Asterix) but it has a lot of well-preserved remains (Lilly loved a cameo of Augustus), mainly in a museum next to Ludwig but also a harder-to-find site near the Rathaus which preserves the remains of buildings and a Roman sewer (below).

And the German museum of sport and Olympics is pretty decent (although don't expect to get to try too many of the activities if your visit coincides with schoolkids).  I learned that the best way to win the German goal of the year competition is some kind of overhead kick.  Lilly learned a lot about the Berlin Olympics. Now that's teamwork.

(okay, I did the easy one)

And, inevitably, there's one war-related museum (the old Gestapo HQ complete with basement prison cells) to keep Lilly happy.

The rail and foot bridge over the Rhine is impressive and has been seized on by romantic couples who have attached thousands of padlocks to it (mostly engraved or written on).

Amazingly, there's nobody on the bridge selling padlocks, but a short walk down the riverbank to a kiosk yielded a result (and the loan of a sharpie).  Guess which one's ours.  No helping, Lilly!

Some people have gone a bit too far:

Of course, Cologne is pretty typical of Germany when it comes to food and drink, so plenty of pig and lager.  The local beer of choice is Kölsch, served (frequently) to your table in 20cl glasses and totted up on your beermat, which makes a nice souvenir.  There are about 30 local breweries, and no we didn't get to sample the full set (most venues only serve one type).  A few also brew malt beer. Hellers was our favourite local independent brewhaus.

The Malzmuhle is a nice old Bierhaus just off the beaten track.

A few samplers.

 

Mmm, pretzel

Rheinland being full of Bundesliga teams, we took ourselves to see Bayer Leverkeusen play Nuremberg. (Leverkeusen is a small industrial town basically set up to service pharmaceutical giant Bayer, just 20 minutes by train, with a very efficient website and print-at-home tickets.) It's then a pleasant walk along a river (which is hopefully not full of chemicals) to the impressive modern stadium.  No, they haven't put up a statue of Lilly: that's really her.

 You can even get beer and pretzels delivered to your seat! If you go through the hassle of getting a proprietary card and queuing up at the end to get your deposit back, since they don't take cash.

Leverkeusen were "celebrating" drawing Barcelona in the QF of the Champions League and, since it was the last match before the Christmas break, they gave a gift to every fan (a small torch).  They also gave three gifts to newly-promoted Nuremberg in a shocking home performance, with Michael Ballack outstandingly bad.  Ah well.  Kudos to the away fans who put on a sustained display of drum-banging, singing and bouncing that I haven't seen outside South America.

It rained a bit too much (and the river was impressively high), but we still got around town to take in the random sights.  No snow, sadly.

You could knock off the best museums in a day and do your Christmas markets in another, so four days was a slight stretch, but Germany's always a fun place to be.  And the journey home is made more palatable by the fact that German airports are twelve times as efficient as English ones (even on Easyjet).  Prost!