Day 26: Cologne is a beauty


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Europe » Germany » North Rhine-Westphalia » Cologne
July 31st 2017
Published: July 31st 2017
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Major props to Clarion Frankfurt - when I checked out I got a very heart happy birthday from the staff at the desk. Again, the area might be super dodgy but the hotel itself I can't recommend enough.

The same, sadly, is not the case for Flixbus. If you're in a rush or have a lot of baggage, save yourself the potential hassle. Please. Bus was 50 min late today. I heard "5 more minutes" 4x from the employee at the station. Funny, I heard that a lot in Nuremberg too when the bus was 70 min late. I was giving it 10 more minutes before I was going to march into the ticket stand, cancel my ticket, walk back to the train station and pay the 40 euro to take a train to Cologne instead. Those of you that know me understand how upset I was that I was willing to do that lol.

ANYWAY, I made it to Cologne a little more than an hour late. The poor people getting off at the airport - a lot of them were worrying about their flights.

Cologne is 100x nicer than Frankfurt. The people are friendly, there's a bustling vibe, tons of little shops and interesting roads to pop down into, very lovely. My hostel is beautiful too - each room is themed - I'm in the girly-girt ballerina room, but it's girly-chique not girly-pink-overload. Each bed has it's own cubby with curtains you can close and the beds are all doubles. Beeeeeautiful.

I decided to go for a walk - I'm not in the city center but after just a few blocks I could see the Cathedral looming overhead, so I just kept walking towards it and found myself at its doorstep within about 20min. (Ha, the fun was trying to find my way back to my hostel...)

The Cathedral is truly spectacular. I love the look of a twin-spire (the 2 towers instead of just one) and the details in all of the outside statues is just second to none. I spent forever just playing with angles and zooming away to my heart's content to find all the little statues and gargoyles around the doors and the sides. Inside is quite nice too. I wouldn't say it has one specific 'wow' feature inside, but the blue/green tall stained-glass windows along the top are quite impressive and just the sheer size of the building is impressive as well. The giant windows give the inside a blue-ish tint which is quite lovely. On my way out I lit a candle, as per usual, and that was that for today - I just wandered back towards the hostel and explored that area a bit. I'm here for a few days, so I'm glad about that.


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