Köln, Part 3: Friday

Back again, Thursday morning, eating breakfast, waiting for my coffee to brew. My preferred coffee-making device is now the French press (or as the Germans call it, “der Kaffeedrücker”—the coffee pusher/squeezer), the sort with a glass canister in a metal frame and a plunger on top. (It is the thing on the right in this photo) It’s a very simple, elegant design that produces very pure coffee, and moreover every single German home seems to have one. Maybe the government sends every German citizen a French press, a free pound of coffee beans and a “#1 CITIZEN” mug when he or she turn 14.

But wait, I don’t have TIME to tell you all about what’s happening now; there’s so much left of the past to relay!

So: Friday morning in Köln. I woke up in time to go eat a massive breakfast in the hostel’s cafeteria thing. This was my third stay in an A&O hostel—some folks would rather stay at dingy pricy places with all kinds of “local character,” i.e. bugs in the beds and rude, hairy men, smoking in the lobby. I tend to regard a hostel as just a bed with a roof over it, so I am happy to deal with a big faceless corporation and bored employees in blue polos if it means I can spend a little more on beer and gifts—so I have become familiar with the breakfast system. You can either buy these little blue “breakfast” tokens for 4 euros a pop and drop them in a little honor system dish when you go down to eat, or you can not buy the tokens and go eat anyways. I chose the latter. Another advantage of a corporate hostel: I do not feel bad not paying for their overpriced breakfast.

Anyways: I ate an apple, two bowls of Müsli with yogurt, and three meat n’ cheese rolls, all washed down with three cups of OJ and five cups of coffee. (I was poor and young and on the road and it was free food, okay?) Phil came down at the tail end of my one-man face-stuffing session and argued a cup of coffe past the surly little rat-faced employee trying to shut down the breakfast. We went back up to the room, where our roommate had come to and picked up his endless phone conversation where he left it off last night—we stayed in the cheapest room available, “dorm-style” with four beds, and our sole roomy was a young Italian man who was always either on the phone or fast asleep—so we waved good morning, put on jackets, and hit the streets of cloudy, crowded Köln.

Here are some PHOTOGRAPHS of the THINGS that we SAW:

I really dug the proportions of this old city gate:This thing used to be like a hulking, impregnable fortress on the edge of a metropolis in the northern wilds; now it is a thoroughly obsolete military structure (stupid gunpowder) in the middle of a nondescript mid-sized city in the middle of modern Europe. And yet, there’s something about it—the 3X3 array of the façade, the contrast between the round towers and the flat central portion, the rough stones and pointed arch down below—that makes it a pleasing and worthwhile thing to keep around. Oh, and in case you’re wondering why I am allowed to like this old thing but not all the old things in Dresden, it is because this old thing has not been resurfaced and polished to a sheen and decked out with drunken angel fountains and plaques about how those barbaric Allies blew it to pieces for no reason.

This is that same Platz that was so thoroughly dead at 6:10 a.m. the day before: We ended up walking through the poshest, touristy, and hence most irritating part of Köln on our way to the Dom (cathedral). Look at all those idiots, consuming goods and services like a bunch of ninnies. Phil and I ran around throwing rotten eggs and yelling “SHEEPLE” for a while, but the power of bourgeois materialism proved too great for our noble free spirits, so we kept walking.

This is fairly crass for this blog, but I have never been able to pass up a Star Wars reference:It’s a quality AT-AT stencil, too classy for a pee joke. There should be an army of these things marching across a white boxcar somewhere.

Hey, it is a promotional cow!I assume this is one of those “we shall unite the city with identical statues” fundraisers. Bessie here has a couple of issues:
1. She is a cow. Come on, Köln, couldn’t you come up with something better? Little cathedrals or Roman centurions or something? Any Podunk two-horse crap-town could come up with cows *cough Brainerd Minnesota cough*.
2. She is a half maitre d’, half pile of vegetables schizophrenic. That’s just crazy. Either give this cow some pants or cover it in cauliflower, but don’t half-ass it. (Or should I say “half-cow” it?! No, I should not.)

(side note: Word just informed me that the document I type all of these blog posts in has so many spelling errors that it lacks the processing capacity to put little squiggly red lines under them all. So, sorry if my spelling worsens. I consider this a victory. 48,383 words and counting.)

Phil insisted I photograph this futuristic, hyper-advanced trike, or “twike,” as they call it in the world of tomorrow. This thing had more electronics than the space shuttle and a windshield wiper. I wish I could’ve seen it in action. I suppose we could’ve stolen it and gone for a super-trike joy ride around Köln, but we had other plans for wheeled transportation…but first, the Dom:Still there, still mind-blowing. Good for it.

I found this bronze very strange, I suppose because of the clash between these two beautifully rendered bishop-type dudes with that cheesy New Age logo one of them is palming off on the other. Couldn’t one guy be handing the other like a model of the church, or a cross, or could we just get rid of the thing in the middle entirely and pretend they are just talking about God and stuff? The silly object between them—consisting of a Christian cross, a Muslim crescent, and a shooting Star of David (are you allowed to do that with a Star of David?) looped around a couple of peaks that I assume to be the towers of the Dom—seems to be ome kind of namby-pamby “So what if we have built the ultimate monument to the one true faith, all (abrahamic) religions are okay I guess.” I wonder if it was part of the original design, and somebody thought it would be a really great idea to juxtapose these Renaisance-style bronzes and their cool veiney hands and photorealistic folds in their catholic man-dresses with this crappy logo that looks like it belongs on a laundromat/bank/Unitarian-Universalist church that folded in the mid-90s; or if this new loopy whozawhatzit was custom-made to replace whatever super-offensive object these guys were manhandling back when they were cast. What could have been so nasty that the “I’m Okay/You’re Okay” pan-faith travesty in the middle represented an improvement? Like a Muslim cleric’s severed head, or like a dead baby with a sign around its neck reading “Jews Killed Me”?

Anyways, that ridiculous statue was instantly forgotten when we entered the cathedral. I didn’t take any pictures of the interior, because it felt insanely disrespectful (dozens of other people had no problem with that), but rest assured that it was quiet and vast and very, very tall. I was blown away, and I understand how airplanes work (sort of) and how the universe is structured (probably) and why stuff falls down when you drop it (it’s gravity). To an illiterate middle-aged (i.e. 27-year-old) peasant farmer with five kinds of intenstinal parasites and a basic scientific understanding of nothing (because science hadn’t been INVENTED YET) who walked into this thing when it was first built, this must have been utterly overwhelming and downright heavenly. Religion sure did used to have things easier, huh?

“Climb the cathedral” was basically the only concrete item on the to-do list, so we paid an extremely reasonable fee of one thin euro (St. Paul’s, in London, charged 10) and started the long, long ascent of the south tower. The narrow, winding, worn stone staircase, designed back when the average height was like 5 foot nothing, was just barely big enough to accomdate the flow of foot traffic up and down the tower, and it seemed to go on forever; but the climb was, of course, worth it:I think this might be a photo contest candidate. I wasn’t even trying. The Dom did it, I swear!

A commanding view of cloudy Köln. That’s the Rhein (duh), spanned by the bridge with all of those lovebird locks, and the low, crenellated building on the right is the Museum Ludwig, which apparently has all kinds of fancy art I didn’t bother to pay a bunch of money to look at.

Heck, I have all the art I need right here!People have been scratching/Wite-Outing their names up here for decades. The oldest date I saw was 1980, which is now 30 years(!) in the past. This little spire grabbed me because of the heartbreakingly sincere quality of the 10-year-old inscription on the left right up against the I’m-sure-equally-heartbreakingly-sincere but (to me) mystifyingly hieroglyphic text on the right. Does anyone recognize the language/alphabet?

They started building this church in 1248 and didn’t finish until 1880. There were some, uh, delays. It is so old that even the hasty repairs of crumbling bits are historical. Look at the patina on this little copper girdle, holding on a hunk of stone:
Köln is laid out in a series of wildly irregular concentric circles, centered on the old Roman colony with the Dom at its heart. This results in a lot of incredibly confusing streets and dangerous corners, but on the plus side you also get wacky little blocks like this one:
I don’t know why I liked this one. Probably because “Warriors” is in quotes.

We eventually got our fill of touching/vulgar inscriptions and grey Köln from 97.52 meters and tromped back down the staircase through a large group of tourists who didn’t seem to understand the conept of “walk on the right.” Spiritually refreshed and midly dizzy—those spiral staircases can throw you for a loop, especially when you have to look down to keep your feet for the entire 8-minute descent—we cut across the plaza towards the tourist info center to inquire about bicycles for rent. I paused to photograph this sidewalk chalk masterwork, because I like polar bears:
On the advice of the friendly tourist info staff (there is a job I would not want to have), we walked down to the river and rented a couple of fine bikes from a little independent stand. It was maybe 1 in the afternoon by this time, so the 10 euro price for an all-day rental was looking a little steep; we had only to express vague skepticism to the young employee showing us around and the owner, an old sprightly dude who loves bikes, materialized and cut us a fine deal, the terms of which I can no longer recall. It must have been a steal, because look at this darn bike:NICE.

Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re all thinking/angrily sputtering: “B-but what about poor Molly, sitting alone in Berlin, while you’re out…cavorting with this, this…strumpet!” Look: I love my bike as much as the next guy. Probably more. But me and Molly, we have an understanding, understand? She’s built like a ship so she’s awful heavy, plus I wouldn’t want her getting mishandled by some oafish rail employee or like hit by a freight train, so she stays home when I go on trips. And as a man has…certain needs, I am completely allowed to ride other bikes while I’m away. Look, if you don’t believe me, then you can take this up with Molly.

My ol’ bike didn’t really have any reason to worry. These were tourist bikes, low-geared cruisers with big knobby tires and cushy seats—definitely not what I’d want for getting around Berlin, but just about perfect for a leisurely ride down the Rhein. There was a most excellent path that ran for several klicks along the river, so we hopped on and sailed on down the bank.

It’s a little hard to see in this picture, but someone had clearly been whipping some donuts on this little stretch of concrete. RADICAL.

This is the University of Köln’s floating biological laboratory, which sounds plain too suspicious to not be a supervillain hideout where the League of Villainy plots a mutant alligator attack on the city. What appeared to be a middle-aged woman in a rain jacket and her big hairy German shepherd boarded the ship while we watched. They were obviously henchmen in disguise, or maybe holograms.

Hey, it’s another statue of Otto von Bismarck! Thank goodness, I had almost forgotten he ever existed:This one was actually pretty neat, though, and I like that he’s holding a shield and not a sword. We had pulled off at a train station to check a map—we spent the whole afternoon looking for an apocryphal ferry across the river—and buy a couple of road beers when we saw this hulking age-blackened structure across the street. I thought it was a church at first, but it was actually just a weird free-standing tower sort of a thing, with this blockily monumental Otto stuck on the front.

I smiled at the first line, snickered at the second:
Although we never confirmed this, I think it must be some sort of Himmelfahrt (Ascension) tradition to tie colorful strips of paper to trees. I thought this one looked very nice, bright and lively in the Rhein breeze on a not-so-bright day.

We kept riding and riding and riding—checking the time, wondering where the ferry was/if it existed/if we’d find it soon enough to get the bikes back by 6—and riding and riding and riding, and as Köln is a relatively small city we eventually got into some fairly rural country. Exhibit A: this horse:
We took a little detour into a small town to ask about the ferry and buy a little lunch. The lunch—hard boiled eggs on fresh baked rolls—was delicious and cheap, but the ferry advice didn’t help much. Just keep going down the river, they told us, you can’t miss it. Phil went into this neat phone booth and tried as hard as he could to become Superman. It did not work out.

Time was running a little short, but we perservered, certain that just around the next corner we would see a great big dock with a big friendly ferry and some friendly ferrymen with elaborate mustaches waving us over for an invigorating jaunt across the Rhein. Instead we found this:And this:And all of this:
Earlier, from atop the cathedral, I’d noticed a ring of heavy industry on the horizon, and we had very clearly reached the inner edge. Köln is in the heart of the Rheingebiet, home to one of the world’s first and largest steel industries. This is where Germany got the metal to build all those railways and bridges, and later some submarines and bullets and stuff. They’ve been producing steel here since steel was like a hot new innovation, and they do not seem to have slowed down. These things were all pretty cool, really, especially the crane, but also jarring and unsettling after hours of pony meadows and hobbit villages, and moreover not very ferry-like at all. We turned around and made tracks back to Köln on the same pretty bank we’d taken down.

We returned the bikes precisely on time, then did some less memorable stuff—including seeing the new Robin Hood movie, which I enjoyed and Phil found an unfaithful travesty—and then went back to the hostel and fell asleep early. We were still drained from the day before, and all that time on bikes just made those hostel mattresses seem even more like featherbeds.

Gaaaaah almost done! Homestretch leftover picture categories:

1. Boats
A. Awesome firefighting boat, complete with a little speedboat for fighting fires down narrow canals. This make an absolutely outstanding toy. I would blow it up with so many firecrackers.

B. This cool old wooden rowing skiff was just sitting on the bank. With a couple of oars and a coxswain we totally could have made off with it, or at least challenged the University of Köln crew team to a rowing grudge match.

2. My foot:
Say look, it’s a picture of my foot:I took this to garner pity for my poor sore pinky toe. It had the sort of little cut that you don’t want to walk on, or like bike all day on. As luck would have it I had my little first aid kit with me, so I was able to disinfect and re-dress it a couple of times throughout the day. This is in keeping with my personal motto, Be Prepared.

3. Advertisements

A. Why if it isn’t a visual pun:Let me explain: Bock means ram or buck, as in a male sheep or goat. (Shiner Bock drinkers: look at your beer. Does it have a ram on it? I thought so.) To have “Bock auf” something is to have a hankering or desire for something. HOWEVER, as auf means on or atop, “Bock auf” something can also mean that something literally has a goat on top of it, as in this advertisement here. For you see, not only is there great general desire for Gaffel Kölsch, there is a goat on this keg as well! I like German wordplay

B. This one requires a little background as well: the Germans are bad at translating movie titles. Oftentimes, American films will be retitled in Germany, I suppose as part of the dubbing process, and oftentimes these new titles are so painfully straightforward and awkwardly specific that I kind of cringe when I read them. Examples off the top of my head:

All About Steve→Crazy About Steve
The Back-Up Plan→Plan B for Love
Law-Abiding Citizen→The Law of Revenge
Avatar→Avatar: Escape to Pandora

I guess they just feel compelled to make it completely clear exactly what the movie is about? Do the Germans generally just go to the theater and pick a film based on the posters? Anyways, this title translation is the best/worst one so far:Bad Lieutenant is a hilarious, bizarre, violent, and great movie starring Nicolas Cage as the world’s crookedest cop. Its full title in the States is Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans, which I found appropriately ungainly and wacky for this thoroughly weird film. Some German producer, however, took one look at that title and said “Port of Call, New Orleans? But he is not a sailor, he is a cop—and a corrupt one at that! Why does it not say anywhere on the post that he is a crooked cop? Audiences will be expecting a nautical thriller! I had better clarify things.” Hence, the new title: “Bad Lieutenant: Cop Without Conscience.” Christ.

C. NIGHT OF THE JUMPS

YES

YES.

4. Beers
At some point we wanted a cheap beers while in the classy, touristy, pricey Altstadt, so we went into the Hauptbahnhof (main train station—have you learned ANYTHING from reading this blog?) and bought a couple of half-litre cans of this crappy beer:
It wasn’t anything special, but I had to include it to give some scale for this next beer, which was found in a grocery store somewhere and consumed during the movie with great success:Heh heh. Yessss. I liked this can (and its Viking) so much that I kept it. It is currently sitting on my shelf above my desk, wearing a tiny plastic sombrero.

Whoooooooooooo one more one more one more post and I’ll be done with Köln, and then I will just have to do the Mother of All Photo Dumps to get caught up on my photos. (Guys, there are so many of them.) I love you all and I’ll be back soon. Thank you to all who wrote postcards, I will work on replies this weekend (I owe one to Sam and Pammy and Nate and Maya and Daniel and [your name here]) along with all of my other work forever.