Köln, November 2003
For Yves' birthday we went to Köln for 4 days. We flew from Glasgow Prestwick Airport with Ryanair to Frankfurt, Hahn. When we got to Germany the plan was to go outside and catch a bus to Köln, however timetables were misread by a certain person, who shall remain nameless (but if you guessed Yves, you'd be spot on!) and after 3 hours spent enjoying the delights of Hahn's office sized airport we hired the very last available car and drove in peak hour traffic to Köln. Actually, I'm being unfair. The airport was wonderful! They have fantastic food, especially the German delicacy Nußecke.
We stayed at Hotel Lyskirchen and got a great room that looked like it used to be a sauna. Wood panelling from floor to ceiling, wall to wall. The bathroom door was quite heavy wood with pretty hand-painted flowers on it. Very German looking! We managed to turn our bathroom into our own private steam room, since the hotel sauna was out-of-order that weekend. It worked very well which makes me think the room was definitely designed for that in the first place, before rennovations took place (supposedly in '95, but the whole place looked like it had been done in the '80's...).
While in Köln we went to the Imhoff-Stollwerck-Museum (Chocolate Museum) which drove us crazy with the smell of chocolate for the whole visit. There's a mini working chocolate factory in the museum which produces the free bite sized chocolate that you're given on entry — that explains the comforting smell! The factory is amazing. It has glass panels on most of the equipment so that you can watch the machines swirling the chocolate around and then pouring it into a mould and then onto a conveyor belt so that the factory girl in the glass box can gather the finished products into gift bags.
One lovely overcast day we went on a boat ride along the Rhein River. There were little santas climbing all over the boat and a real live Saint Niklaus (how do you spell it?) on board to give away presents to kids. The trip was probably the most boring part of our stay in Köln and I wouldn't recommend it. The scenery along the river is ugly, especially in poor weather, and the excessively happy xmas music that was played drove us nuts but, since it's a boat tour, we couldn't get off for two hours.
The rest of the time we spent visiting the Dom (Cathedral), the shopping malls (pedestrian streets), some brewery pubs and a great goulasch shop where all they sell is goulasch. In spite of the humble establishment and the stainless steel hospital-like plates, it was the best goulasch we've ever eaten.
The special beer from Köln is called Kölsch (big surprise!) and comes in small test tube sized glasses of about 200ml. It's very refreshing and quite easy to fill a table with empty glasses! We tried our first Kölsch at a brewery pub called Kölner Dom where we had Jägerschnitzel (Veal schnitzel topped with mushrooms in a mushroom/pepper sauce).
