Friday 27th September 2019

The hotel name Lyskirchen should have given us a clue, but maybe it was best that it hadn’t, so at 7a.m we were woken by Church bells, very close! It didn’t really matter. With our time in Cologne having been cut short we wanted to be up and out so that we could at least visit the cathedral and walk by the river before getting our train to Berlin at lunchtime.

We were interested to note at breakfast just how few people were using their phones, or even had them with them! People were actually talking to each other!! And we only saw 2 mobile phone shops. And furthermore we didn’t have to avoid collisions with anyone walking down the street, eyes fixed to the screen. What a delightful experience! Will Berlin be the same?

Another bonus was sunshine and blue sky. Everything just looks so much better! We arrived at the cathedral before too many crowds. It is a stunning place. The really high vaulted ceiling, the delicately stained glass windows, and its simplicity. Although it survived the bombing of WW2 it was badly damaged, but fortunately some of the oldest windows had been removed to protect them, and the damage was able to be repaired. How it survived the impact of bombs shattering buildings all around it when the first part of it was built in the 1200’s is a mystery to me. Actually how they managed to construct such a building like this at all is amazing! I’m sorry I wasn’t able to get good photos inside. Sometimes you just need a decent camera!

We spent a long time looking around and had the bonus of a Mass being said, which included music. Not the big pipe organ but a smaller one. Nevertheless it was beautiful listening to it with the acoustics of the cathedral.

By then it was time for a quick coffee and then a walk along the river before checking out of the hotel and heading back to the station for our train. We would like to come back to Cologne. There is more we would have liked to have seen and done, including the sports and Olympic museum, plus the chocolate museum next door😱😂

Our train today left on time and we had a pleasant and relaxing 4 hours or so reading, catching up on some email correspondence, doing some sudoku and various other puzzles, and watching the world go by.

Having checked into our hotel in Berlin we then met up with David for dinner at a very nice Vietnamese place nearby where we planned tomorrow’s sightseeing!