on the eve of departure...

Right then, so we've just about seen all that Cologne has to offer, the massive Catholic Dom in the centre of town which somehow escaped the bombs of countless allied bomber crews, even though when they did drop them on what they thought was the target, the munitions would often end up many hundreds of meters from their intended point of impact. Just goes to show how much the Catholic church had/has a hold on the world. It is a truly impressive building, and took hundreds of years to complete. I bet there were some horrendous council meetings where the Mayor and his supporters had to defend the spiralling costs of the project as it encountered century after century of delays and budget overruns...
Anyway, so there really isn't that much more to Cologne visually, it was a ruined city after WWII and so the architecture of most of the buildings, apart from the Dom, is post 1940s. This is in stark contrast to Berlin, which, while equally pulverised by the war, underwent a pretty faithful rebuild of it's historic buildings. It's also much cheaper, and being the Shylock cheapskate that I am, this is a very good thing. There is one thing which is universally cheap though. Alcohol. Tonight we are having some drinks with our wonderful hosts of the last few days, Ang and Andy. The drinks that I speak of include a €5 bottle of vodka. At the same 'Penny Markt' I also spotted bottles of wine for as little as €1.25. Sure they are probably thinly disguised paint stripper but at home in NZ we have similar wines retailing for $10!
Today Lindo and I decided to buy a day pass tram ticket so that we could get around all over the place for no more than €6.70. It seemed like a great idea at the time, but it wasn't that easy to purchase, the correct change was needed and no-one was keen exchange a €5 note for coins! Germany is certainly not anywhere close to being a cashless society, they still have 1c coins! I've got 2 of them in my pocket along with a couple of really heavy 50s, a couple of oversize 10s and maybe a 5 or two...Stop talking about money!
Oh, I'm just going to have to post this, I'm going to bed and I've had too many cheap vodkas.

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