Jill & Al in Europe: Cologne

At the Paris train station there was a lot of police and security presence, all personnel were wearing guns. Our train platform opened 20 minutes before departure and our bags were x-rayed and we passed through a scanner as we went onto the platform. Before the train departed three policemen walked through the carriage, goodness knows who or what they were looking for. Our train took us through Belgium to our destination of Cologne. At Brussels we stopped to exchange passengers and saw no sign of security there.

The evening we arrived in Cologne we planned to have dinner out but when we went down the street the bars were packed with fans watching soccer on TV. We decided it wasn't our scene so went back to the apartment and cooked dinner. On our TV we watched Germany beat Italy, after 8 penalty goals they were into the semi finals of the EUFA Euro 2016. The cheers coming from the street drowned out the TV.

The next day there was a big gay parade in the central city so to avoid the crowds we took a short cruise on the Rhine. We travelled upstream for 45 minutes and got off at Rodenkirchen, which is only 6km upstream. This suburb was very quiet, as it was a Sunday most places were closed, but we did have a few options for lunch places. On our wanderings we found the little church of St Maternus. After a couple of hours we caught the boat and had a 15 minute trip downstream to where we started from.

Downtown Cologne has several streets that are pedestrian only and when we started walking here we came across a street full of food stalls and music blaring out. It was the follow on from the gay parade and a bit noisy for us so we went to investigate a spire we had seen. This turned out to be part of the city hall which was a mismatch of building styles. The entrance is a grand 16th century arcaded hall and the tower (spire) was from the 15th century. The main part of the building was post war construction.

We were in another city with another cathedral that had a tower we could climb, so 520 steps later we were admiring views of the Rhine from 97 metres up. The most noticeable thing about this cathedral is its size. It's four times the size of Paris's Notre Dame and twice the size of Amiens Notre Dame. It suffered war damage but the twin spires remained standing; 72% of the old town was destroyed and some has been restored and some replaced.

This is a reproduction of one of the finials at the top of the tower

This is a view of the back

We took an interesting tour through a chocolate museum, which covered the history of chocolate use, growing it and making it. There was a small demonstration plant with chocolate being made and we were given a couple of tiny samples.