533

We arrived in Köln, Germany (Cologne) yesterday. We are staying in a studio apartment that is less than a 5 minute walk from the cathedral. It's pretty nice being so close to the things we want to visit.

We decided to have dinner in a brauhaus both yesterday and today. A brauhaus is a beer hall and the main beer in Cologne is Kölsch. Once you sit down, a waiter brings you a little glass of beer; you don't even have to ask for it. Once your glass is empty, they bring you another, until you tell them no more. You'll see on the picture below that each glass is supposed to be .2 liters (about half a pint in the US).

Last night for dinner, Tommy decided to be adventurous and order the pig knuckle (ham hock). Here is the before and after of his feast:

It really could have been dinner for 2!

Today we visited the cathedral and the Roman-Germanic Museum. The cathedral is amazing. There had been a church on that site since about the 4th century, but it wasn't until around 1248 that construction on the current church began. Cologne cathedral became a stop during the  Middle Ages for pilgrims because it was in possession of relics from the Magi (We Three Kings). In 1164 Frederick Barbarossa (King of the Holy Roman Empire) conquered northern Spain and took the relics from the city of Milan. Archbishop, Philip von Heinsberg,  transferred the supposed bones of the Three Magi to Cologne. Money generated by the pilgrims provided the funds to start building the cathedral to house their relics. Our guided tour allowed us to see the shrine more closely than everybody else!

The reliquary was made in around 1200 and is made of gilded silver, jewels and enamel. Here are some other pictures of the inside of the cathedral.

Some of you will remember from our England trip blog that we cannot resist a tower tour. Well, would you believe, Cologne cathedral has a tower tour?! We climbed the tower on the right hand side, all the way up until it starts to get really pointy.

There were 533 steps and we climbed 332 feet high. Here is what we could see from the top:

Some more of the outside:

iPhones don't do well at night with the front facing camera

The Roman-Germanic museum had a ton of Roman artifacts but very little in the way of English explanations. There were some amazing mosaics:

the museum was actually built around this mosaic floor. this mosaic is in it's original position

Tomorrow we make the last leg of our trip. We're off to Amsterdam!