Cologne Day 3

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Travel Blog: Day 5 (I think) Cologne/Heidelburg
Welcome back to the good life. I hope that all is going well in America, but I must say, things are better here than they are there… this is simply because I am living a glorified life, traveling around, meeting strange people everyday and having fun everywhere I go… sure beats working. We are on the train right now, going from Cologne to Heidelberg. Heidelberg is known in Germany as a students city, there are a lot of universities and colleges there, and it is supposed to be very good to the youth. Problem there, is that when we planned the trip, Josh and I both had different places that we wanted to go to. Cologne was my main choice, because I am very interested in the Kolsch beer there and the other things in the city. Heidelberg and Lucerne (Switzerland) were Josh’s choices, so he planned those days… Josh does not plan like I plan.
In America, I just roll with the flow of things and never plan anything, but here I have become OCD like my mother and plan everything that we do… however, I trusted Josh to take care of Heidelberg and Lucerne… I just found out that he does not even know where our hotel is… I have maps for all of the ones that I planned out. So we are going to be walking around Heidelberg for quite some time today looking for the hotel… I have the booking confirmation and the address, but no map. We will spend 2 days in Heidelberg and the head to Munich (which was a mutual choice and frankly a must when going to Germany).
Now I’ll take you through our day yesterday, it was a long day, so stick with me. We woke up early yesterday because I was headed museum and history hunting. Josh is not very into museums, but was being a very good sport and tagged along. We went to the EL-DE Haus, which is basically the only actual existence of Nazi Germany that is still in Germany. Everywhere else, all remnants of the regime are gone, but at the EL_DE Haus, there is a very good museum that was entirely about the rise and fall of the Nazi party and the war… it focused much more on the way the party worked and how the phenomenon swept across Germany than it did about the atrocities that were committed. There was rooms that were about the Holocaust and the persecution, but it was much more about how this odd political phenomenon engulfed so many people in Germany just 60 years ago… I was completely fascinated. I did take a video of this that is about 20 minutes. My battery went dead right before the room on the persecution and execution of Jews and others, so please don’t think I just skipped that. I will post as soon as I can figure out how to do so, as well as some of my photos.
We spent around 3 hours at the museum. However, by far the coolest thing that we saw, we saw in the first minute. You start in the basement there, and the basement was a Gestapo prison that was still intact. It was shocking and amazing to see the way that things were there. I have seen American prisons, but this was completely different, and the stories of torture that the audio tour told us about were very moving. I am very sensitive to all that type of thing because history is so interesting to me, its all about the movement of people and how they react to different phases of life. That is why the Nazi period is so interesting to me, because that was just 60 years ago, but it was such a widespread philosophy that changed people. It scares me because it makes you understand that political ideology can get insane quickly and change what were normally very good, industrious people into what was essentially murders of others. I don’t want to see anything like that every happen in the world again, but my many studies in the area have helped me to understand that it could very easily happen again, and that history says that it will happen again (see Yugo, Vietnam, Korea, Iran, Cambodia, etc).
After the museum we were both very tired (but while I had a history smile on my face, Josh had a “we need a beer” frown on his). The museum was close to the hotel, so we dropped off my video camera and grabbed a quick bite (hot dogs and potato salad… hot dogs in America are much better). After lunch, we just walked around and spoke with some people for a while, and then Josh remembered something, his suitcase had broken (the wheels were gone), and it basically weighed 70 pounds, so we went to get a new one. We headed down to what a woman had told was the major shopping center in Cologne… it was very interesting, in that it was basically like a big mall, except all the stores opened to the street (but there were no cars). There was even little pretzel stands and drink places like in American malls. We found a very big luggage and bag store (3 stories of bags). Josh picked out the largest suitcase that they had and bought it as well as a duffel bag… it was nearly 300 American dollars. I have never bought luggage before, but that seemed insane to me and we had went to another shop a few days earlier that I knew was cheaper, but Josh did not want to upset the woman who helped us (she was very helpful)… In America, I would be the same way, but here I look for the bargain everywhere, because I will never see any of these people again and won’t care much if they didn’t like me… I suppose that is the American attitude and I have embraced it. So we bought the luggage, walked around for a while, grabbed a quick beer (it was getting hot) and then dropped off the luggage at the hotel and rested for about an hour.
That is when the night really started. It was our last night in Cologne and we were trying to meet up with the people from the night before (they had emailed us), but without a phone it is really hard to organize, and we never did see them. We went to the other brauhauses that we had not been to, and tasted as much Kolsch as possible… this was all on me, because Kolsch beer is so intriguing to me, and it is only made in this unique part of the world. We ate at a brewhouse where Josh ordered what he thought was steak… he ordered it rare and the waiter (who spoke very little English) looked at him like he was the dumbest man he had ever met. Turns out what he ordered was essentially sliced beef or pot roast with a strange raison sauce all over it. The raison sauce may taste good here, but to an American palette it did not taste good. It did come with apple sauce that was basically just crushed in the back room, and I’m telling you now, that is the way to eat apple sauce, throw out your jars and just crush apples.
I had what I thought was a bratwurst and sauerkraut and potatoes… The was essentially what I got, but the bratwurst was about a foot and a half long. Josh got a photo if I can ever post it. It was very good though, it tasted more like summer sausage than bratwurst, but still good. We continued the night drinking and having fun with Germans, which is a story for its own time, but I am running low on my battery and I am sure you are tired of reading. I will say that the people were great and several bought us beers for our companionship (including one man who’s wife just left him). But that basically takes us to now, so we are up to date… I am learning the language fast here… you pick it up when you are around it so much, maybe I’ll known German when I return. I’ll post this as soon as I can and hopefully things are very good back home, we have seen the flooding on the CNN international, and I really hope that it is not as bad as it looks. Kiss your kids and say your prayers,
Ryan

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