Koln

On Friday night I was supposed to learn some more Dutch songs while participating in my first ‘Cantus’; (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantus).  Unfortunately, when I was trying to leave work the car that I was supposed to have was no where to be found so I was unable to drive to Leuven.  They called a cab for me and I told him to step on it to make the 19:42 train to Leuven, so he did everything he could to get me to the train station at 19:40, but when I walked in I realized the train left at 19:34 so we received some bad information.  Then, I was lucky enough to have to take the 25 minute walk to my hotel where I was so bummed and tired I just went to bed at 9 PM.  Saturday morning I took the train to meet Leanne :-) at the airport and we were planning to head to Cologne for the weekend.  Her plane was a bit delayed so we stayed in Brussels until our train left to Germany.  When we arrived in Germany we walked out of the train station and ‘Holy Dom’ – the Dom is the HUGE cathedral just outside of the train station and it was beautiful (could definitely use a power wash though!). 

After we checked into our hotel we walked toward the city centre and found a place to eat dinner and we found this nice little pub in the Alter Markt and ordered a ‘Halve Hahn’ (bread, Dutch cheese, and onion) and potatoes with a fried egg – delicious!  Then we saw a huge Ferris wheel across the Rhein River so we took the journey over there and we rode the swings, the Ferris wheel and I rode this ride called the ‘Stargate’ – which is the witch’s wheel on steroids!  It spun me round and round, up and down, for almost 10 minutes and I think I said “O Sheizer” almost 75 times!  We then kept on pub hopping until we stopped for some German fries on the way back to the hotel. 

Sunday we woke up fairly early to a beautiful day and the first thing we wanted to do was to scale the Dom - ~530 stairs to the top and the stair case was a very small, spiraling staircase nearly the entire way up (and down) so it was rather cramped and people were heaving by the time they reached the top!  It was much more fun to go down the stairs and laugh (internally) at the people who were breathing heavy and I knew they were note even close to the top yet! 

After taming the Dom we headed toward the Chocolate Museum which used to be owned by my client but we sold it back to Lindt a while back.  It was fairly interesting (more for Leanne) as I know how chocolate is made and we had an amazing dessert / hot chocolates afterwards.

After the museum we were on a mission to find a pretzel and some German sausage at a Brauhaus.  First stop – ‘Peters Brauhaus’ and we ordered a wiener schnitzel – and guess what – this IS NOT sausage!!! It is this beaten piece of pork and it only leads to disappointment.

So we made our way to the shopping area and found a huge pretzel and it tasted like a normal pretzel you would buy at any ball game.  But, after we went to another Brauhaus to order a real sausage and it was priced by the quarter meter so we knew we were in business!  So good too!

Then, we hit a couple souvenir shops to find my magnet then we headed back to Belgium.