Up bright and early, breakfasted and onto the bus for the ride into Cologne. This is a theme on this cruise. The ship docks just long enough for us to disgorge us and while we ride the bus into town and do the excursion it catches up to us – arriving about the same time we’re done. This is a more efficient way to maximize our time while minimizing the time the ship spends at a given pier.
This isn’t all bad, though, because it gives us a chance to catch a bit of the countryside that we wouldn’t see from the river.

Arriving in Cologne we met our guide and set out on a walking tour.

The gold colored flying car in that last photo was originally installed on a bridge crossing the Rhine River. There was a city councilman who hated it and worked to have it removed. He finally got his way with a compromise that it would be placed somewhere else. So it ended up where it is now – directly across the street from his office window.

Winding thru the streets a bit we ended up at the Cathedral.

The story is that the Cologne Cathedral was spared in the bombing because alied bombers used it as a locaton marker is very likely not true. First, many raids were ocnducted at night when the blacked out cathedral would not be visible to the high altitude bombers. Second, the bombing was high intensity carpet bombing. It would have been impossible to pinpoint a safe zone in such an attack. In fact the cathedral was hit by at least six bombs. Early in the war all the windows were removed so when one of the bombs exploded within the cathedral most of its blast energy blew out thru the window openings. Several bombs landed on the roof – which is made of steel, so their blast did no structural damage. Throughout the cathedral there are signs of repairs and mars on the columns – remembrances of the war, either from the bombing or from a tank battle that took place in the plaza in front of the cathedral late in the war.

Property rules do not allow protests to take place in front of the cathedral, but the artistic expression of chalk drawing is allowed.

At the corner of the plaza is the last remnant of the grand Roman gate at this location. This side portal is a relatively small size compared to the main gate (twice its size) and the four story gatehouse.

At this point we were given 20 minutes to check out the inside of the cathedral.
OK.
We did go inside to get oriented but we opted to come back later for a more lengthy investigation.

Next we moved down the street and into the commercial section.

We passed the Fruh alehouse and talked (at length) about Kolsch beer (more on that later)
We heard the story of how Cologne (from the Roman for ‘colony’) got city status, and of the life and death of the lady who was born to the local indigenous people and turned out to become Emperor Nero’s mother (before he had her killed).

We talked about the sheer idiocy of designing a brutalist blockhouse museum next to the finest gothic cathedral.

We passed by the cathedral once again.

And then it was time for lunch.
Rather than return to the ship with many of our tour group we opted to stay in town for lunch and a bit of shopping before catching a shuttle bus later.
So we returned to the Fruh alehouse:

Kolsch is the local brew (by definition it is brewed within 50 kilometers of Cologne). It is a very light beer served very cold in .2 liter glasses (so it doesn’t get warm). The standard is that they keep replacing empty glasses with full ones until you tell them to stop. We stopped after 3.

While there we noted another robot busboy.

After lunch we stopped by the 4711 store.

The brand 4711 is the ‘original’ eau de cologne, still manufactured in the area. The name 4711 dates to a time when the French had control of the town. They undertood a project to assign (the first ever) house numbers to every building in the city and the building where the cologne was manufactured was assigned 4711. The family has been using this designation for their brand ever since.

Then it was back to the cathedral for a more leisurely and complete visit.

Before we left we rested a bit, contemplating the universe (and the inside of our eyelids) and then headed off to the shuttle bus.

Back at the ship we rested (some more)/blogged, roused ourselves for happy hour, took in the port talk, and had dinner.

Following dinner there was a recital of classical music by a local clarinetist (with piano accompaniment). They were really good and we both managed to stay awake.

Then it was off to bed to prepare for a new day of adventure.

Till then…
R