February 8, 1998

February 8, 1998 - Sunday

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Today started out bright and sunny. But first, a little bit about the past couple of days. Maria and I were out walking about town yesterday doing some shopping when we came across one of the old city walls. You can see the wall in the picture on the left. Then about a block later we ran into Tanya. She lived above Mike and Maria in their old apartment building. She is having problems with the landlord of that building too.

Later that evening Mike started staining his chairs. Maria has been chasing after Mike to stain the chairs for as long as I've known them. The entire apartment smelled like a chemical factory for days. Even with all the windows open. And the amount of dust that came from sanding the chairs!

This morning (well, actually this afternoon) I dragged my lazy butt out of bed to go take some pictures around Köln. With the sun shining so brightly it was a good day for taking photos. The first one here on the left is the nearby tram station, Heumarkt. This is a frequent crossing point for me on the way to/from the city Altstadt (old centre).

Directly on the left is the direction to go to Mike and Maria's apartment. To the right is the Altstadt.

If we walk right and cross a street we can see the ancient Roman ruins that were found during the digging of a foundation for a building. That halted all construction of the building and an archeological team moved in to try and preserve the ruins. It is a bit difficult getting around the site. There is little sidewalk space and sometimes you are walking in the street to get around to the Altstadt.

The picture on the left shows a bit of the Köln skyline. The spirals of the Dom cathedral are in the background. The Roman ruins are at the bottom of the photo.

There are some interesting church steeples in Köln. The one on the right is right off the old city centre. There are not many churches in the Altstadt.

This photo on the left is a side view of the Dom cathedral. It is difficult to get the entire cathedral in one photo. I ended up taking another photo of the front of the Dom from almost 500 metres away just to get the entire shot in the frame. The spirals on the Dom were the tallest structures in Europe until the Eiffel Tower was built.

You can also see that the Dom needs a good cleaning. It looks like they are starting an effort to clean the building. But it will probably be quite some time before the entire cathedral is restored to it's original state.

There are several places to go around the Dom. There is a large market area that streches for kilometers. But on Sundays, all the shops are closed. So walking around today was rather uninteresting eventhough there were people out and about.

One thing I do have to get around to doing is getting some photos of the Dom when it is lit up at night. It was the first thing at 22h30 that Antoinette and I saw when we got out of the Haupbanhof (train station) in Köln and it is a magnificent sight.

Speaking of which, walking around the back of the Dom cathedral you run into the platform area of the Haupbanhof. So this photo on the left shows you what the platform area looks like. I don't know who all the bicycles belonged to. There is no entrance to the station from this side. Perhaps they belonged to some of the people walking about in the bright sunshine.

I continued my walk down to the banks of the Rhine river and back into the Altstadt. This one street is very quaint looking and whilst the sun was at the wrong angle for a good photo I think you can get an idea of how picturesque parts of Köln look.

There are several good restaurants and bars along this street. Some of the bars have live jazz music. And the bands are surprisingly good. Some of the bands come by only once a month because they tour around Germany and other nearby countries.

Well, that is about it for today. Tonight we are having some guests over for dinner. And, of course, Maria will probably cook up one of her 5 course meals. I don't think our guests have any idea what they are in for tonight.

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