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Published: June 28th 2005
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Early rock music
This big hunk of rock and hazard to navigation on the Rhine is the Loreley. Sailors preferred to blame accidents on a seductive blonde ghost singing upon the rock, rather than their own piloting skills. (In truth, the geography of this rock makes the river especially treacherous in this spot, so the legend has some merit in its own way....) After an arduous hike last night through Mainz to the Stefanskirche, which seemed to me to be in a rather unsavory neighborhood, I decided it would
not be practical to attend Mass in the morning before my action-packed day of travel.
This may have been a poor choice, because after weeks of hot and blindingly sunny weather, for my Sunday morning Rhine cruise I got thick cloud cover and haze. Ugly cruising weather, ugly photography weather. Nevertheless, I did cruise the most scenic part of the Rhine between Bingen and Koblenz, where there really is a castle (or ruin) at every one of the many bends in the river, and every quaint half-timbered little town has at least one huge, majestic cathedral towering over it. Amusingly, our little ship, which originates in Rüdesheim, was packed from rail to rail, both decks, with Japanese tourists when it arrived in Bingen. I managed to situate myself at a window table in the restaurant down below, right next to the door so I could pop out for photographs and pop back in. I drank tea. Even more amusingly, the
entire horde of Japanese teemed off of the ship at St. Goar and St.
O God, you are SO big....
The Kölner Dom puts one's own miserable little life into the proper perspective. Goarshausen, where 5-6 different huge tour buses were waiting to slurp them all up. It was a sight to behold. After that, the ship was almost totally empty the rest of the way to Koblenz! I had wanted the cruise to be relaxing, but I think it might have passed relaxing and slipped into kinda boring. I still think it was worth doing, because even though the trains also run alongside the river, the ship is the best way to see both sides clearly and have plenty of time for photographs.
In Koblenz, I caught a train to Köln (a.k.a. Cologne), arrived around 15:00, and stashed my luggage in a funky high-tech locker. What's cool about Köln is that you walk out the front door of the Hauptbahnhof (main train station) and BAM! there's this enormous Gothic cathedral, the Kölner Dom, largest in Germany and one of the largest in all Europe, smack in front of you. Which is what I came to see. Even better, the signs out front said there would be a Sunday Heilige Messe (Mass) at 17:00. Perfect! I wandered around inside and did all my sightseeing, gawking, and picture-taking, then paid a leisurely visit to the (blissfully underground and air-conditioned) Schatzkammer (Treasury), filled with relics and treasures and excavations of the early church foundations. While underground in this basement museum, I kept hearing (and feeling) great rumblings overhead; later, I figured out that these were
trains. After all, the station is right next door. Can that possibly be good for this ancient church?! I emerged from the basement just in time for Mass, which I enjoyed greatly.
Finally, I caught a train to Aachen, about an hour away and home to another noteworthy cathedral, the Aachener Dom. After checking into my hotel, I hiked up to the church and discovered that its visiting hours end at 19:00 (about the time I had arrived in Aachen) and started again the next day only at 11:00 (10 minutes after I would be on a train out of Aachen). Hmm. This left only one option for visiting the interior of the church: daily Heilige Messe (Mass) at 7:00 the next morning! After a tasty Griechischer Salat (Greek salad) and Kölsch (Köln-style beer, hoppy and refreshing) for supper, I headed back to my hotel with a solid game plan for tomorrow morning. This independent Type-A traveling thing is working out pretty well.
Interestingly enough, I got chatted up on the train from Köln to Aachen by a perfectly nice Nigerian man, but then also stopped in the middle of the sidewalk in Aachen and totally blatantly hit on by another African man. The effusive compliments were nice, I suppose, but it became clear he was going to keep talking, and I really did have sights to see on a schedule, so I cut him off as politely as I could and walked away. My totally uninformed and wild guess is that African immigrants to Germany probably learnt English at home and not German, and also perhaps they have other difficulties getting the time of day from German ladies (Germany having, as it does, an amazing lack of racial diversity). That's about all the explanation I can muster.
Gute Nacht!
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