Cologne / Köln, city that spans the Rhine

Kazaj

11 hours ago

Cologne is famous for having the world’s tallest building, it’s Cathedral (Dom) but that was in 1890, however, surprisingly it is still the tallest cathedral in the world to this day.

It’s a very imposing cathedral, it’s looms above you darkly, not helped that it was a wet grey day.

The view from the Cathedral steps with the station on the right

We became embarrassed at how many times we heard on our audio guides how much of the city, it seems almost 80% of the old town, had been bombed during WWII but the Cathedral was left fairly unscathed by the British bombers who used it as landmark for their bombing raids.

The stained glass windows have all had to be replaced

The inside of the Cathedral was almost as gloomy as the exterior apart from the soaring ceilings

As is was Sunday we had to wait til the service had finished till we could look around

As it started to rain we caught the noddy train which took us on a tour of what was left of the old city centre.

On the way round it stopped at the Lindt Chocolate Museum

Which had a massive chocolate fountain, supposed to represent cocoa pods (gold??) growing off a tree!

It may have looked odd but the warm chocolate was amazing.

We also saw the old market square

And the Town Hall

St Michael’s Church, which also wasn’t open

The following day we decided to take a river cruise, which took us almost all the way back to our campsite 😲

We noticed this little guy waiting for his boat too, hope we don’t have to wait as long 😂

There are some very impressive apartment and office buildings along the riverside.

View of the Rhine River from the road bridge by our campsite. You can see the Cathedral spire top right at the bend of the river

I wasn’t struck by Cologne it might be because it rained quite a lot, which made it a bit miserable, or maybe it was due to my OH being very vigilant and spotting a would be thief with her hand in my backback on the first day, which made me worry about being robbed for the rest of the time I was there.

However, the campsite was very nice