Eau de... Cologne!

We arrived in Cologne, or Koln, after a near fatal train trip for both Pru and I.

The train was absolutely packed full of people so we had to stand in the area between carriages, it was fairly cold and uncomfortable but we weren´t too fussed.

The mayhem began when Pru was quietly listening to her iPod while perched on the edge of her suitcase. Without warning, she slid off the side onto the floor of the train thrashing out at a lady next to her to try and get balanced. I was also listening to my iPod at the time and didn´t hear her fall. I turned around and there she was, like a pile of filth on the floor. Not long after this we thought we were at the right stop. We weren´t, and only realised this after exiting the train. By exit I mean I almost plummeted two metres to my death off the step (it was icy!) and managed to end up with one leg wedged between the train and the platform and my suitcase weighing down on the other half of me. People stopped and stared and it wasn´t until Pru screamed for help and waved her arms that somebody came to my aid. I was left with a nasty scrape and bruise on my left leg that is still healing after four weeks.

We arrived quite late in Cologne and decided to go and grab something to eat. After the hype of Amsterdam it was nice to have somewhere a little quieter to spend some time. We found a fantastic Lebanese take-away place where we had huge plates full of meat, tabbouleh, four different dips and haloumi cheese - YUM! After the crappy Dutch food in Amsterdam this was a nice change.

The following day we headed to the Dom of Cologne, the biggest cathedral in all of Germany. It was stunning! Again, I´ll be uploading photos to facebook soon for those of you who want to see it. After this we headed to the Lindt chocolate museum. It taught us all about the history, manufacturing and trade of chocolate. It was really interesting and we ended with a liiiittle bit of free choc which didn´t hurt one bit. They had a really cool chocolate fountain and machines set up actually making the chocolate so we could see the whole process. That day we´d also visited the Roman-Germanic museum which housed a lot of artifacts from the Roman occupation of Cologne.

The next day we headed to Bonn which was a short twenty minute trip away from Cologne. Bonn is famous for being the birthplace of Mozart. It was a beautiful, quaint and cheap university town. We went to Beethoven´s house and found out a lot of trivia about the great maestro! After this we wandered around some MORE Christmas markets, which we really couldn´t get enough of in Germany. We tried eierpunsch, an egg and alcohol mix that looks kind of like egg nog but tastes a whole lot better.

Next, we were off to Munich. With only a few days left until Christmas!