À Köln, Allemagne

This has been a very interesting weekend, with a lot of firsts. And since I promised to share both the good and the bad with you (in my introductory post), I'll stick to my word.

The beginning of the weekend started off great. I traveled with a bunch of friends to Köln (or Cologne), Germany. Not realizing that it is a fairly small city with very few tourist attractions, we had to come up with a plan for each day to keep us busy. But as soon as we walked out of the train station, my jaw just dropped. There was a gigantic Cathedral standing directly before us. However, this picture (to the right) does not do it justice. Nonetheless, I realized just how American we actually are when all of my peers HAD to make a quick pit stop at the one and only, irresistible Starbucks chain for some good old American coffee, chai tea latté, and a frappuccino. Apparently, Starbucks does not exist in Brussels and, let's face it, the Church wouldn't be going anywhere in the next 10 minutes.

After everyone got refueled, we finally stepped into the Cathedral. It was monstrous and intriguing.

We then dropped our backpacks off in the Pathpoint Cologne Hostel, which was, surprisingly, in a great location, clean, and offered plenty of amenities. Next, we explored the city (since we headed in the wrong direction) and finally made our way over to the Rhine River, which was followed by dinner in an authentic German restaurant.

The night came to an end after meeting up with a few of our other ISA friends and meeting a group of Austrian architecture students who had also come for the weekend to explore the city.

The next day we did quite a bit of hiking, but not in the way that you might expect. We climbed 533 steps to get to the top of the Gothic Cathedral. It took forever and it was a spiral staircase, so we got dizzy going up and even dizzier going down! (This, below, is a picture from the top of the Cathedral).

After working up a sweat, we headed over to Schokoladenmuseum (chocolate museum). We got to see the process of making Lindt chocolate bars and truffles, learned a little bit of chocolate history, and even walked through a mini rainforest inside the building. Let's just say it was well worth the trip & 5 euro entrance fee (the chocolate was DELICIOUS)!

Next came lunch, which was followed by an afternoon of window shopping. Little did we know, there was a major strip of upscale shops, filled with people. The day was coming to an end, so we went back to the hostel to cook dinner with the other group of ISA students that we had been separated from for the last day and a half. We hung out until about 10pm, and then we set out on a different type of excursion...

The final day in Köln seemed to go on forever. We walked across the Hohenzollern Bridge, which was adorned with thousands of padlocks. They're referred to as "love locks" and couples inscribe their names on a lock and attach it to a fence that runs along the length of the bridge.


By this point we had seen just about everything there was to see in the city, except for a couple of art museums. We checked out one of them, the Roman Germanic Museum, which boasted a beautiful exhibition of Roman jewelry, ceramics, and prehistoric finds.

After hanging out at the hostel for a couple of hours, it was time to take the train home. Unfortunately, this is where the weekend takes a turn for the worst. The train took a little bit longer than expected because another train's engine stopped working in front of us, and thus, we were forced to take another route home that was about 40-50 minutes longer. Once off the train, my friend Megan and I tried to find our way home. It was late on a Sunday night and we weren't sure of the schedules for the various types of transportation (metro, tram, bus) that we would need to get home. To make a long story short, while waiting for the tram (which seemed to take forever to come) we got mugged :( I knew we should have taken a cab, but we simply made a really bad decision to go by foot. The police, somehow, got to us just as the two men had taken off and were able to catch them, after a bit of a chase (going against traffic on a main road!). We spent about an hour and a half at the police station giving our statements, but we were very lucky. We were able to get all of our money back and albeit a little (or maybe a lot) of emotional wreckage, we remain physically unharmed. So, lesson learned. NEVER EVER, EVER take public transportation on a Sunday night without a large group of people and ALWAYS go with your gut. Well, as I said in the beginning, here's my version of the good, the bad, and, aboveall, the drastically unexpected.

Au revoir.