14-Aprile-2006

We made it to Cologne a little after noon and found ourselves a couple hundred feet from the towering Dom, which is the biggest church in a German city. Before we went to explore the city we wanted to find a place to sleep for the night. As luck would have it, there was a “hotel street” (that is a street with 500,000 hotel signs.. ok, that’s an exaggeration) and we split up to find the best price. After checking two hotels I looked for Casey and Jeff and Jeff got the best price so we followed him towards a hotel he checked. It turned out to be a great deal, a little under 30 euro a night and we had free use of the computers (most hotels charge) and an awesome breakfast. In fact, we liked it so much we decided to stay for two nights.

After we were all set up in the hotel we talked to the lady at the desk and got the low down on the town. Being Sad Friday, no stores were open but most of the museums were. We decided to check the town out and picked up a free tourist/advertisement guide that turned out to be really helpful and I can’t figure out why every town doesn’t have one.

We walked around the main streets and decided that Germany definitely had a lot of familiar sights. We found hagan daas.. almost immediately and there were a few starbucks, a dunkin donuts and also a few stores we recognized from Italy. The weather wasn’t optimal so we just meandered around and then headed back to the hotel for a little while.

In the evening we went to two of the brauhaus advertised in the handy dandy booklet. It was definitely an older scene but the beer was good and cheap. I was expecting to get darker beer in Germany but all of the breweries we visited had a light beer. We did have a “on the verge of mean” experience.. at the second brauhaus we were wishing for some KBC peanuts, but since we couldn’t have those, we decided to get some fries or something to munch on that we could share. After getting our paws on the menu and realizing it was rough to read, we thought we found what we were looking for but when we tried to order, we were told that was the kid’s menu and we couldn’t get it. So we asked if we could get some pommes frittes and the guy told us this wasn’t McDonald’s. ouch.