Cologne

---

From Helsinki we flew to Cologne, Germany. We just had one night there and had found a great deal at the Hilton, so we got off the plane looking forward to a nice quiet night filled with bubble baths, television in English, and high thread-count sheets. That wasn’t exactly what happened, however. As we got off the train from the airport in downtown Cologne we noticed big crowds of people everywhere and lots of commotion. We finally figured out that it was Christopher Street Day, a huge annual gay pride celebration, going on just outside our hotel.

We dropped our stuff in our room and headed out to see the city and have some dinner, picking our way through the crowds of people. We went to see Cologne Cathedral, the biggest tourist sight in the city. It was pretty impressive but a bit hard to enjoy with so many people around. After a relatively quiet dinner by the river, we bought a couple of beers and went to a concert on a big square that seemed to be the center of the celebrations. Unlike the crowd that we'd seen near the train station, many of whom seemed to have overindulged a bit, the concert was great - lots of people dancing and singing and having a good time. The band was good and even had a sign language interpreter, which was pretty cool. We later saw a drag performer (Miss Sophie, if I remember correctly) and she also had an interpreter. We couldn’t really understand the lyrics to her songs but judging by the way people were laughing they were pretty inappropriate - too bad we don't know more German!

The next morning we had lattes and muffins for breakfast at Starbucks (how American tourist of us) and stopped back in to see the cathedral again before we picked up our rental car.

---

Photos

Fun concert in a square in Cologne
Christopher Street Day