Cologne - Touring the City - By Bus, By Foot and By Air

The Germans dont get up as early as Rosie and The Operator…shops dont open till 1000am and the tours dont start till 1030….half the morning is gone!

The Open Top Hop On Hop Off bus stopped right out side our apartment, the first pick up of the day…Rosie and The Operator got the front seat and we were off. Rosie is not normally a fan of these tours, but it helps to get your bearings and shows you the larger environment of a city. The trip was narrated in both German and English and was OK.

We got off three quarters of the way around to ride the Gondola over the Rhine. It was fabulous! The carriages were pretty small, Rosie is glad it wasn’t that busy and 4 people didn’t have to squash into it, we got a carriage all to ourselves and got a fantastic view back up the Rhine to the city.

The Rhine is wide and flat and beige looking, the banks are clear of debris and there was barely a ripple in the huge waterway. Under the Gondola station was a Thermal Pool, Rosie got a good shot down into it and down into old fraus swimming togs….uuggghh. Whilst waiting for the bus we hopped into the Botanical Gardens for a look.

The giant German machine is efficient and everything runs completely to time, exactly to the minute the next bus pulled up and we hopped on and continued our tour. It was 1230 when we finished, Rosie had bought a walking guide of the inner city which was about 45 mins long and showed all the points of interest in the pedestrian only zone.

We thought we would start walking it and pick a nice place for lunch along the way. All tour roads start at the cathedral here, we walked around the side and headed down towards the Rhine where the huge canal touring boats park.

It was a magic day, a day where you had to walk in the shade as it was getting hotter and hotter, there was a wee kiddies water park on the banks of the Rhine, it looked cool and so refreshing.

Rosie and the Operator walked to the Rheingarten and found a table on the terrace overlooking the Rhine under a huge shade umbrella,

The local tipple is a beautiful cool light Kolsch beer and it went down a treat, so did our in season white asparagus specials, Gary had ham with his and mine had salmon with a hollandaise sauce. Delicious. A busker was quietly playing classical guitar which kind of drowned out the drawling London girls loudly talking about their drinking exploits through out Europe…no wonder everyone cant stand the English!

We carried on walking to the Old Town where colorful warehouses from the 1700s are now transformed into cafes, icecream shops and pubs. The giant tower of the town hall looms over the shady square.

The Alter Market containing the Jan Worth Fountain, a famous 16th century Calvary lieutenant that spent his time fighting the French who were besieging German towns dominates the middle, this is the area for the Koln Carnival celebrations at Easter.

Cologne also has a strong archaeological presence, when excavating areas for car parks or building foundation Roman ruins have been discovered, they keep a portion in tact after recording it all and build viewing platforms around them to protect them in the likes of the car parks to preserve them. It proves that Cologne has been continuously settled since Roman times.

Cologne is a great city, easily navigable, compact and explored on foot. It has so much history from every era in time and many stories to tell. As Rosie was writing this….she heard a Bang, Bang, Bang, Bang….loud and exactly like gunfire….Rosie and The Operator rushed to the balcony for a look….and our hearts stopped! This is the site that greeted us…what looked like a massacre out on the street was actually part of an organised protest of something or another….bloody buggers, yes they were.