Treading gingerly...: The Charisma of the Cologne Cathedral

It's been more than a month since I wrote and today marks the beginning of my last week in Germany. I realized I should get over my inertia and laziness for the sake of my poor memory and document my summer in pictures and word equally. Pictures, I have been. But, I stopped writing and now I start again. More so because it will keep haunting me that I haven't completed my summer blog and I hate leaving things incomplete. So, here goes --

The hiking trip at the black forest really left me sore all over, yet I was determined to continue visiting most of Europe. One of my friends from Berlin was interning at Juelich, a town at the border of Germany, France and Belgium. Dider, a red-headed French Canadian (haha 'DDA', I'll always remember you this way!) planned to visit Brussels the following weekend and considering my love for Godiva, I knew I had to join him for this one. So, I go onto my favorite website - Mitfahrgelegenheit to search for ride shares from Tuebingen to Brussels for that weekend. I freakking even had the name of my Brussels blog post ready (From the land of the finest chocolate-Brussels) !! Little did I know that I would never be seeing Brussels this summer...

Come Friday, my itinerary consisted of 4 ride shares, complete with their license plate numbers, car colors and a 4 hour midnight stopover at Cologne. As planned, I took off on Friday evening and reached Cologne late Friday night. I still remember clearly the moment I stepped out of the Hauptbahnhof: I was both intimidated AND stupefied. My brain did an elaborate search to find the right words that describe the exemplary piece of architecture that lay before me - but it failed. My English vocabulary failed me once again. I was looking at the Cologne Cathedral. The moment my eyes fell on the majestic masterpiece, I was speechless. My mouth dry, lips slightly parted, body stiff; I stood there transfixed for three whole minutes before finally pulling out the camera from my bag. The sheer grandeur of the humongous cathedral coupled with the brillant illuminance left me dazed. Never before had I seen something this magnificent outside of the pages of a book. In that moment, I knew I had to travel all over the world to see many more sights as these. In that moment, I knew all my bookish knowledge woud never compensate for the mesmerizing experience that I might have when I'm physically travelling through the world contained in my history and geography books. In that moment, I thanked God twice; First, for creating mankind who built such a magnanimous piece of art like the Cologne Cathedral. And then, thanked Him for helping teeny little me travel across the cliched seven seas just so I could stand in front of it and gaze in astonishment.

The Magnificence of the Cologne Cathedral.

The Hauptbahnhof with the missing 'O'. :-O :-P

Anyone who knows me by now, can most definitely bet their life on the fact that I have pictures of the cathedral from every angle...aaand yes I do!! Because I reached Cologne really late in the night, I had arranged to crash at a fellow RISE student's place till the morning. While waiting for Chris and Srishti to show up, I must've taken a minimum of 30 pictures at the very least. Chris is an unconventional frat boy from Tucson, Arizona while Srishti is this totally calm and composed Indian from Massachusetts. The were such awesome hosts! They took me around Cologne in the night to some of the most happening places. Lucky for me, Cologne is the 4th biggest city in Germany and unlike Tuebingen, isn't dead at night. We had a great time talking throughout the night about life in general, till it was time for me to meet my rideshare at the Hbf. With many thanks and a promise to friend each other on facebook, I left for the main train station early Saturday morning. A couple of unanswered calls to my rideshare driver later, I decide to walk around inside the station and do a little window shopping while I wait for the driver to turn up. Wait. Wait. Wait. Call. Wait. Call. Call. Call. Wait. After two hours of exploring every nook and corner of the Cologne Hbf, I receive a call from the driver saying he had canceled his trip to Brussels that day. :-| I wished I could scream and swear at him, but that really would have been futile. We really had no agreement apart from our word and of course men's words can be broken as easily as 0.1mm lead pencil. So there I was, at the Cologne Hbf with no clue of how I would reach Brussels and it was already Saturday afternoon. Just one and a half day more. A train ticket would cost 5x times as much as what I would have otherwise paid had my driver not ditched me. I sent a quick text to Didier apologizing that I wouldn't be able to meet him in Brussels. I looked around. The city seemed nice. Going back to Tuebingen right now would be a waste of time and money having come this far. And, I'd heard Cologne had a famous Chocolate Museum!! Needless to say, I decided to spend the rest of my weekend in Cologne. =)

Wandering around the Cathedral

First thing I did was get myself a map and find a good hostel for the night. By now, I know check-in times for most hostels in Europe are usually 2pm/3pm. So I killed time by wandering around the cathedral and taking more pictures. I even ended up climbing the 596 winding stairs to the top of the cathedral to get an aerial view of the city. Yeah, that ascent was really tiring after my hike in the Black Forest the week before. On my way down though, we passed by the church bells and incidentally, it was time for their hourly ring. Try to imagine metallic bells thres times bigger than your little self, ringing right in front of your eyes. Not one or two, but five!! Clang, clang they kept on reverberating the entire dome. It took a while for my ears to get accustomed to the tremendously loud sounds before my hands could once again fish out the quintessential camera!

Look at the size of the bell in relation to the men.

By the time I got downstairs and found a cheap hostel for myself, I was totally drained of all my energy. Even so, because I hadn't slept at all the night before. So I rested for a few hours before going back into the city to explore Heumarkt and Neumarkt - the two main markets of the AltStadt. Neumarkt is where the big shopping destination is - H&M, Fossil, Marco Polo, Zara, Adidas...you'll find most of your favorite international brands here while Heumarkt did the locals. Of course every other store in each of these markets was a bakerei and of course I had to try the 'Berliner' this far away from Berlin! The sugar coated donut is deliciously soft and sweet with fruit jelly surprisingly gushing out of the donut into your mouth. I had two of those. =)