Today, Sun Sept 10th, we left Amsterdam to go to Heidelberg, Germany with a stop in Cologne. I’m stuck writing the name as Cologne rather than the German spelling of Köln because that umlaut is just too hard to type on my ignorant American keyboard.
We woke up early at 5:15, did our final the packing, and rolled/dragged our suitcases to the first tram of this Sunday morning. Amsterdam had been so amazing and so lovely that it is hard to say “goodbye”!
Even in our last moments there, there were surprises, like this heron bird in our path, prowling the hazy early morning streets and apparently hunting for rats like they dip for fish during the day. Truly a magical time in a magical place that we’ll cherish forever.
The mechanics of travel still present a dozen small struggles every day: We arrived only 3 minutes early for our first tram. Then, the tram rejected our credit cards for no obvious reason. Then, we couldn’t find our seat numbers because the train tickets were a jumble of confusing numbers. Then, the train itself arrived 20 minutes early, enough so that we couldn’t tell if it was the right train. Boy, little challenges like this are frequent during travel. And now we are leaving Amsterdam, where we’ve had a week to learn their system, for new and unknown challenges. Worse, we’re leaving an English-speaking country for less and less US-friendly places. This could be a gradually growing challenge for the rest of the trip.
Once we got aboard, the train ride was wonderful. Our assigned seats gave us a great window, safe luggage space, and a comfy table. Our window seat had great view of the countryside, with lush fields and even some nature right outside of Amsterdam. It was fast and smooth and quiet.
And then we were in Germany! We saw the first hills we’d seen in weeks and (short) trees everywhere. It’s a beautiful country from the train.
At times, I glanced at the train’s speedometer, showing a shocking 120+ mph. It certainly didn’t feel that fast, nor did the passing terrain quite confirm that speed, but it was unmistakable: We were outpacing cars on the highway, and we even almost kept up with an airplane that was coming in for landing! And its speed was undeniable because of how quickly we arrived in Cologne.
Cologne is marvelous from the first moments, because the (towering) cathedral is right outside the train station. We gawked and craned our necks up and took our photos. It really is an unbelievable monster of a cathedral, highlighted by the odd black stains that make it pop out visually. The black smears made us joke that this cathedral isn’t just gothic, it’s goth! It’s so tall and so wide that it’s impossible to capture in a single shot from so close up. Some later Romanesque cathedrals had one tall layer of glass windows… and Gothic cathedrals used buttresses and added a second tall layer of windows… but the cathedral of Cologne has another 2 or so layers on top of that in its towers. Plus, it’s not only huge, but amazingly ornate, every inch of it well-detailed. It’s just impossible to describe or even capture in pictures. It’s literally awesome!
Eventually we gathered ourselves and went into to see the equally opulent interior.
The sheer scale and the madly colored stained glass give the place an otherworldly feeling. Light falls on the intricate statues here, but I couldn’t even tell where it was coming from.
On a much more mundane note, we popped across the street from the cathedral to Cafe Reichard, a super-fancy restaurant known for its desserts. It was elegant, with mirrors and crystal and pink upholstery everywhere. We got a great black forest cake and a gooseberry meringue. Delicious and highly recommended.
It was almost gaudy, though. For example, this is a (SFW) pic of the men’s bathroom. Every urinal has a display showing a tropical aquarium(!). There’s a nice garden and sculpture in the middle(!!). Yes, you can see straight into the unused stalls, but their space-age glass turns opaque when you lock the door(!!!). It was a staggeringly expensive place to pee.
We wandered the streets to the highlight of our Cologne visit: the National Socialism Documentation center, an educational museum about the Nazis housed over a small prison where the Gestapo detained, interrogated, and executed people. It was great and impacted us a lot. The permanent exhibit is the main focus, but the whole building embodies the the banal cruelty of the Nazi phenomenon. Though the building is of course dated, its exterior appears to be an utterly typical office build and its interior is just offices and hallways… but, in here, bureaucrats did their mundane Nazi work of oppressing the majority of the population and exterminating their enemies and scapegoats. It’s a heavy place.
There’s so much to say here but I don’t have time. For one thing, it brought home the scale of WWII bombing as I’d never seen before, showing a huge map of bombed-out Cologne that included the areas I’d just walked through to get here; the streets and buildings I’d seen were almost all flattened ruins. It’s hard to imagine, much less to have lived through. For another, it surprised me to learn that the German public didn’t collectively acknowledge or reckon with the horrors of the Nazi period until after 1987, about when the Berlin Wall fell. The museum claims that Germany’s attention was captured by the post WWII economic revival and by the Cold War, and it took real activism to overcome that status quo and bring this museum’s documentation to light. Things like this were news to (admittedly ignorant) me. The tour ends with the prison rooms themselves, which also capture the horrors of the abuses there, from the visceral smells to the many messages scrawled on the walls. I wish I had time to do justice to it all in writing.
The only “fun” thing I can pass on here is this ballot from Germany’s 1936 election after the Nazis consolidated power, starting in 1933. They literally had no choice but to vote Hitler back into power.
Back in the here and now, we headed to the old town for lunch. On the way, we passed through this shopping district which, like every one we’ve seen in Europe, seems to be doing just fine; much better than malls in the USA, and with hardly any vacancies. Oddly, every store was closed, except a few fast food spots, I guess because it was a Sunday. The stores near the cathedral were all bustling, so we pondered this one fruitlessly while walking past many, many closed stores.
Since time was short, we capitulated and got a convenient lunch of some typical German street foods: Curryworst sausage with fries and schnitzel. The “curry” is just a runny sweet curry-inspired sauce poured over the sausage (aka “worst”). Both are great. German food is AOK.
We walked through the old town. It is charming and feels historic, but most of it was bombed out during WWII and rebuilt. So, it has some old-style buildings with gables and narrow floor plans but made from modern materials. It was no Amsterdam, but it is nice and certainly different than the industrial scale rebuilding that mostly happened after the war.
Interestingly, the roads were laid out in a rough grid, which makes it very different from the old cities I’ve known. It was a breeze to get around, unlike the labyrinths we’ve been wandering through all vacation.
We stopped in Great St Martin Church. After seeing so many, they all start to run together in my mind, but this stood out. It dates back to 1175 and has been rebuilt and renovated over centuries of disasters like fires and WWII. It retains some simple Romanesque building elements and a clean white style that matches the Benedictine monastery that mostly used it. It was refreshing and beautiful. It really showed me that “less is more” for my tastes in cathedral, compared to the main Cologne Cathedral.
What I love is how the simplicity of the building leaves room for the religious message (which I don’t agree with) has room to be expressed.
Then, down to the Rhine River just to see it and walk along it. The first thing we noticed it how very very wide it is. We’d planned to walk across one bridge and back across another to survey the city, but we didn’t have time at all. We could hardly handle the heat here in the shade, much less in the exposed full sun on that entire walk. Sadly, there was construction that kept us from getting closer to the river, but we had some great moments. The paved, path treelined path along the river reminded me of Portland’s wonderful west bank Esplanade, including with happy people and families enjoying the space.
Just look at all that water… and then, when you reach the other side, it’s a death march across those concrete steps. Still, a beautiful view.
As we climbed up from water level back to the town, the main cathedral swung into view again. This framing, from far away, is much more impactful than the closeups we’d had at first. The size of the thing lands harder when it’s next to (and towering over) the rest of the city.
With that, our short day in Cologne was over, so we reclaimed out bags from storage and made our way to the train platform. Again, we faced the practical challenges: Where should we stand on this crowded platform to ensure we get a seat, much less a spot for luggage, much less two seats together? What are the announcements saying in German? What are the new German signboards telling us about when and where our train car will arrive? After many stressful minutes of that, the full train arrived, a lot of people disembarked, we shoved our way on board, and then we easily found two great seats. We settled in and congratulated ourselves on successfully boarding our first German train…
Then, the announcements started coming. Mercifully, they were in English (and German) so we could follow along. Bad news: our first train would be arriving late to Mannheim, too late to make our connecting train on to Heidelberg. We fretted and did a lot of nervous research on our phones to make the best of it. But after a time, there was nothing left to do but ride on to our fate.
We rolled in to Mannheim and tried to make our next moves. We originally planned to get onto a 6:35 train. The next available train was a 7:35 or, if that failed, a 7:40 with an indirect route, but then both of those trains simply never appeared on the platforms when their time came. Loudspeaker announcements said something about our trains, but they were only in German in this smaller Mannheim station. Google translate, my only real plan for situations like this, didn’t work on the distant, echoing audio from the speakers. People here weren’t helpful. We couldn’t make it to a help desk without stepping away from the platform. Our arrival time, already late, was past sunset and getting later.
Around this time, our spirits were so low because of how helpless we were… no good choices but to wait. It also sunk in just how much less pleasant this was than our earlier travel, little things like seeing trash on the streets and significant numbers of homeless people and cigarette smoke and pigeons (so mercifully few until now). All together, it was just too much. Finally, finally, a train arrived at 7:58 , we crammed ourselves on, and rode on to Heidelberg.
After arriving at 8:30, we called a cab. The driver spoke passable English and seemed very friendly. At first, I thought he must be scamming us because there was no taxi fare meter in his old sedan. Then, the meter appeared out of nowhere once we started driving as a slick holographic projection on his rear view mirror. We were, at last, heading to our room.
In the final stretch, in the now-dark and confusing old town of Heidelberg, gps navigation stopped working, so we desperately got out to take our chances on foot. Stef could stop and admire the amazing scenery (like the stunning gate leading to the Old Bridge) while Dan stumbled around piecing together maps and checks until we found the hotel reception. We got our keys, faced a final trial of walking three blocks to find our room, and reached it around 9:30.
But here it was! Our room. It looked just great.
…Although this hotel had the European-style shower Stef had been anticipating – but five hotels in, so that’s a great track record. Overall, showers here have been resplendent.
We paused for a meal of the snack food we’d been carrying all this way, turned off or alarms as a vow to getting enough sleep tonight, and went to bed. We’d made it to Heidelberg after one of the hardest train rides of our trip so far.