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We've just had a leisurely breakfast, after a much-needed sleep-in until 08:00. We have nothing to do this morning except catch our train to Bingen. The sky is grey, but not as threatening as yesterday, and there is no sign of rain.
Speaking of yesterday, after the Praetorium we wound our way back to the almighty Dom and took the plunge inside. The interior is enormous - high and lofty, with light streaming in from the many vast stained glass windows high above. The rows of windows from just above head height to above 15 metres depicted detailed scenes and people, while those higher up bore tiled geometric patterns. A cherry-picker was parked inside in one corner, with two men up in the basket doing some sort of repair or cleaning work to the inside of one of the windows. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of people inside the cavernous space, milling about, gawking at the sight, or sitting contemplatively on the massed pews - yet everyone had heaps of space to move freely and it felt more empty than crowded.
After some initial sweeping photos of the whole from the rear, we went on a walking tour around the inside, beginning by approaching the main altar up the central aisle. The altar is positioned at the centre of the cross-like arms of the cathedral, with pews facing it from both sides as well as from the front. The altar itself we barely actually noticed amidst the rest of the amazing sights all around - not one, but two organs perched precariously halfway up different walls.
On the left side of the altar dais were stairs leading to the crypt. They descended straight, then turned right at a landing
bearing an octagonal labyrinth design inlaid in black and white stone in the floor. Inside the crypt was a small chapel and some inscriptions of the
various bishops or whatever they are here in Cologne. The ceiling was decorated with carved reliefs in stone tiles. Exiting the crypt, the next thing was an
offering chapel in part of the northern cross arm, where thousands of votive candles were burning and petitioners kept walking up and adding more before
kneeling to pray before the representation of Mary and Christ.
Heading around to the rear of the main altar, we first passed an exit leading to the Domschatzkammer - the museum housed in the vaults below the Dom - then around over an intricately mosaiced tile floor with several large circular designs showing images mixed with Latin text in geometrically arranged patterns. The rear area was semi-circular and contained several small chapels arrayed along the outside wall. In the centre was an area walled off by a heavy iron fence and gates. Inside that sat a large glass display case and inside that was a stunning gold box, glowing in the glare of dozens of lights aimed at it.
I've just finished off a sushi box from Nordsee (a chain of fish places) for an early lunch. I was hungry after restraint at the below-par breakfast this morning, and the idea of sushi was tempting. I wouldn't recommend Nordsee for sushi to any true connoisseurs though - it was passable but not up to the standards of almost any place I can think of in Sydney. The rice was a bit gluggy and too uniform in texture, the avocado which I pulled out of the California rolls (since I don't eat it) didn't even look like avocado.
Back to yesterday, and the mysterious glowing gold box at the back of the Kölner Dom. This was the reliquary of the Three Magi - purported to
contain the earthly remains of Balthasar, Melchior, and Caspar, the Three Wise Men who travelled to pay homage to the baby Jesus. The relics used to be in
Milan and were spirited away to Cologne in 1164 in a wooden reliquary, which was replaced with a new custom-made gold one which took an artisan thirty
years to complete. It was about the size of a coffin but taller - a metre or so - and completely covered with ornate sculpture and decoration. This is
considered to be the prime relic kept at the Cologne cathedral and it was certainly treated and presented as such, with several spots around it with places
for offering candles. Around it, the semi-circular walls held more amazing stained glass.
Continuing around the main altar, the cross arm to the south was less impressive, as renovation work was being done and some of the stained glass was covered by scaffolding and tarpaulins, and part of the floor area was roped off, but it nevertheless held one awesome and colourful giant window that was still visible. Next we did a circuit around the northern and southern aisles, parallel to the main central aisle, to get a good look at all the stained glass along the inside walls. This feat accomplished, we took another minute to drink in the overall effect before heading out to the Domschatzkammer.
A combined ticket to this museum and a climb of the Dom tower cost €5 each. Michelle wasn't sure if she wanted to climb the tower in case it involved
tight passageways and staircases. The guy assured us it was wide enough for two people to pass all the way, so she decided to do it.
The Domschatzkammer, however, came first. We descended into the depths of the vault below the cathedral to a level where some of an original Roman wall remained as part of the vault wall. The deep vault was split into two floors by a new mezzanine level. The bottom level had two rooms featuring various artworks and sculptures that had been part of the cathedral but have been replaced during restoration work, including decayed old stone statues from over the doorways leading into the building. The second room held priestly vestments - robes and mitres and stoles and so on, richly decorated with gold threads and detailed embroidery, dating from various parts of the last thousand years.
The mezzanine floor above held jewellery (crosses and rings worn by high clergy), gilded crosiers galore, processional crosses, altar crosses, candlesticks, chalices and cruets, and so on. The big thing on this level was the original wooden casket used to bring the remains of the Three Magi to Cologne from Milan, which was decorated with enamel plates portraying the story of the Three Wise Men on one side, and older scenes from the Old Testament on the other. All of this was stunning enough, but the top floor of the vault held even more amazing things. This was the reliquary store where dozens of reliquaries contained the bones of various saints. There were three reliquaries displaying what were allegedly small pieces of the True Cross, one containing a nail from the cross, and one with a crystal cylinder supposed to hold a thorn from the Crown of Thorns. There was also a staff used by St Peter himself.
With the Dom museum out of the way, the only thing left to tackle was the climb up the tower - 509 steps, 95 metres. It began with a tightly wound stone
spiral staircase that was indeed wide enough for two people, but not by much. It climbed up and up and up and up. A few times we paused to catch our
breath or let descending people past. Eventually, after several minutes of climbing, we reached a landing with a doorway leading into a large open
chamber housing the giant St Peter's Bell - all 24 tonnes of it, and the largest working bell in the world. It was housed in a draughty room with a couple
of smaller bells and a bored looking guy in a booth to watch over it. We walked around a one-way loop around the bell, passing through some tight passages
around the corners of the room, and pausing at the viewing stations in the four sides. The tower could be seen steepling far above us, supported here
on the inside by heavy wooden beams.
The tour of the bell chamber done, we continued up more spiral steps. This time they did not last as long before depositing us in a large empty space directly below the spire above, through the edges of which a light sprinkle of rain fell from the grey clouds that were miraculously higher up still. A doorway led from this room, marked "Do not enter", while a sign marked "Round trip circuit" pointed up a modern steel staircase ascending directly up in square spirals to the stone ceiling about ten metres overhead.
We headed up, trusting our weight to this frilly latticework
of steel, and passed through the ceiling into another room, where rain pattered down through the filigreed holes on the great stone spire ascending into the
heavens directly above. The portal led into a single-file corridor of stone which passed us up a few more steps and to the exterior of the spire, where
the rain was a little thicker in the air, but still prevented from free access to us by the heavy stonework all around us. We had magnificent views across
the grey city and the Rhine River far below, interrupted by numerous decorated mini-spires, filigrees, and carvings protruding from the central structure.
The amount of detail in the building is enormous - it's almost fractal in nature containing ever more detailed and small ornamentation at each scale at which
you examine it.
The great shame was that this sublime viewpoint was ruined by the copious presence of graffiti scrawled densely on every single square
centimetre of surface accessible to fingers from inside the safety cage around the walkway. The fact that people could be so idiotic as to defile a place
of both such spiritual significance but also simply of unsurpassable cultural heritage and stunning beauty with their name scrawlings made me angry.
It was a display of the very worst of human nature in a place that should only be presenting joy and wonder. One hopes that at some point the ongoing restoration
of the cathedral will get around to removing every last scrap of graffiti and putting some effort into preventing it from reappearing.
After walking a circuit of the viewing platform around the spire, which afforded good views of the roof of the main section of the building from far above, we reached a descending spiral staircase, this one narrow enough to require single file and making passing very difficult. It seems they added the steel steps and made the route one way to avoid any such problems on this section. The downward spiral deposited us back at the "No entrance" doorway in the room with the steel staircase. From there, it was all the way back down the wider spiral stairs - a descent that took a good few minutes merely because of the large number of steps to be traversed. With the tower completed, we left the Dom, some three and a half hours after entering it.
I was hungry, having had nothing but cake for lunch, so grabbed an apfelschneckeberliner (special €1!) from a bakery and devoured it with gusto. It was almost 18:00 by this time, and I looked in the Cologne locality guide that our hotel had given us for a possible dinner location while Michelle perused a few more shops along the main shopping drag. She found a leather shop that had some jackets and coats that she liked, and tried on a light brown thigh-length coat with the eager help of a friendly shop assistant who was quick to point out that all items were 20% off, and even quicker to point out how marvellous Michelle looked in the coat. It did look good on her, but she tried a size larger for comparison, before finally settling on the smaller one as the best fit. As the lady rang up the purchase, I enquired about a tax-free form so we could claim the 19% European tax back at the airport on departure. There was some paperwork to be completed, which took a few minutes, but we left with the coat and claim forms that should be good for a significant refund.
For dinner I'd found, of all things, a Hard Rock Cafe, which Michelle jumped at as soon as I broached the possibility. As it wasn't far away we walked
over and were shown to a table by a guy who spoke pretty good English (for the tourists no doubt). The waitress arrived with menus in English and never
used a single word of German with us as we ordered burgers - a vegetarian for Michelle and a blue cheese hamburger with additional mushrooms for me. They
were of course huge, but we were hungry and finished them off easily. As in all Hard Rock Cafes, we scouted the walls curiously, looking for any really
cool rock memorabilia, but the section seemed pretty sparse until we explored for the toilets and found an entire other floor upstairs (currently unused
with the few customers present), which held shirts worn by Elvis and John Lennon, a Madonna bustier, the drum head used by Larry Mullen Jr to record
U2's Angel of Harlem, a U2 guitar, and the leather jacket worn by George Michael in the Freedom video.
With our food and rock memorabilia appetites sated, we wended our way back to the hotel. I noticed the weather was fine - at least not raining, and not windy - and tonight would be a better night for photography than last night. Michelle rolled her eyes but agreed to come along if I went out again. We rested in the hotel for about an hour until it started getting dark, then did a check on the state of the weather. With no rain or wind, the decision was made to give the photos another try, and we returned to the Domplatz for some tripod work.
Unfortunately, it began sprinkling lightly as I set up,
but not enough to prevent a few good photos that should turn out considerably better than the ones from the night before. The rain slowly got heavier
until I was protecting the camera with an umbrella between shots and exposing it to the elements only during exposures. A bunch of teenagers loitered
for ages, goofing off right in front of the main Dom doors, preventing me from taking a decent photo with no people in it for several minutes, during which time
the drizzle grew in intensity and I got fairly wet, since I was protecting the camera with the umbrella and not myself. Eventually I got tired of waiting
and took a last series of shots as the rain became quite heavy and I decided to give it up for the night. At least it wasn't windy.
So accomplished, we trudged back to the hotel through the rain, which made the streets slick with reflections of lights and leant a magical air to the bustle of the city.
We are resting for a short while before dinner after an afternoon of sightseeing in Bingen, at the southern (upstream) end of the Romantic Rhine Valley.
The sky cleared not long after we left Cologne on the train this morning, and our trip along the Rhine was sunny most of the way. We arrived in Bingen
at about 13:00, and the first order of business was finding our last hotel for the trip. We walked a few hundred metres from the Hauptbahnhof, across
a bridge over the Nahe River to the town centre, then sought the best-sounding of the two Lonely Planet recommendations: the Cafe-Hotel Köppel.
After a scenic routed detour caused by missing a non-obvious turn, we located the cafe. (We needed to keep up our score of getting lost on the way to
hotels.) The hotel entrance was down a side lane and the reception was closed and dark, but a bell at the door soon summoned a cheerful lady who checked
us in for two nights. Our room is much larger and nicer than in Cologne, and costs about half as much. We are on the top floor overlooking the pedestrian
mall running east-west through the heart of the town. No view of the Rhine, but we can live with that.
After a few minutes to settle in and catch our breaths after the hot walk from the station, we went down to the cafe attached to the hotel for a cappuccino for Michele and an iced chocolate for me, only this time the waitress interpreted my "eis schokolade, bitter" as "heiss schokolade", and I got a hot chocolate instead. I couldn't be bothered changing it, so drank the hot choc, which was very good and relaxing, sitting here in this tiny, not overtly touristy town on the Rhine.
After refreshments, we walked through the small shopping district, then turned down a side street to head down to the river and a lookout point at the confluence of the Rhine and Nahe, which afforded a good view of the river valley and the opposite bank with its steep terraces of grapes, a ruined castle not far downstream (Burg Ehrenfels), and the Mausturm tower sitting prettily on a small island in the river.
We have returned to our room for the night, but the story to be told needs to wait for a revelation yet to be described, so right back to the afternoon, where we were watching the scene from the bank of the Rhine, with long barges plying the waters to and fro, flying flags of at least three nations. From there, we walked back through the town and up the hill to Burg Klopp, the castle dating back to the 13th century. It consisted of a square tower detached from a relatively small manor-like building of stone, surrounded by a double wall with a deep pit (full of trees) between them, and a pair of gatehouses leading in, although we approached via narrow stairway up one side. It was very windy there at the top of the hill, but sunny. Still, the wind was strong enough to be dissuasive to an extended stay. While up there though, we ran into our first tourists here in Bingen - an American family betrayed when their kids peered down a wide well-shaft in the courtyard and expressed their amazement. The well was impressive and fairly deep, but nothing compared to the monster we'd seen at Festung Marienburg. It's pleasant to be at a small town with no obvious tourist presence after the excesses of Rothenburg and Cologne, in terms of tourist and plain people density respectively.
We returned from the Burg via a steep stairway straight back down to the town (rather than the roundabout way via sloping streets leading up the back that we'd taken to get there by following a map), ending up in Burgmeister-Neff-Platz, a small square we hadn't seen previously, where stalls were being set up for some sort of event. We looked around curiously and found a poster announcing the Bingen Sektfest, from 10-12 May! Being the 10th of May today, it was clear that we'd arrived just in time for the festival. A quick check of my phrasebook revealed that sekt is sparkling wine - very cool, as it's about the only sort of wine we drink and I'd been lamenting the fact that we were on the Rhine and might not even bother trying any wines. So we were excited by this fortuitous discovery and discussed it excitedly as we returned to our hotel for a brief rest before dinner. The festivities would apparently begin in the evening, so the plan was to have dinner first and then wander back over to the platz to have a look at the action.
We rested for a while until about 18:30, then went to find a German restaurant recommended to Michelle by the lady who had checked us in. We walked to the
indicated spot on the map and found a homely garden out the front of a very local looking place called Gaggianer. Exploration showed all the outside
and inside tables to be either occupied or reserved, so we found the spare end of a table occupied by a family (parents and a young girl) and asked if we could
sit, and they said go ahead (well, the German equivalent I presume). The menus came in red manila folders with graffiti and messages from past customers
scrawled all over the outsides, and only in German.
I located a few vegetarian dishes for Michelle, and she settled on trying the Grüner Sosse - a specialty of the Frankfurt region - a herb sauce served over potatoes and boiled eggs. I chose Königsberger Klopse - something I'd been intending to try if I got a chance. The meals were delicious and probably the most authentic local cuisine we'd had anywhere so far in the most authentic local atmosphere, devoid of touristy embellishments. I decided to try ordering a Jagermeister as an after-dinner digestive, but he waitress said something and brought a menu over again to point out the list of available drinks. A guy on the adjacent table turned and said in flawless English, "Are you looking for something similar to Jagermeister?" He proceeded to recommend a couple of choices from the menu. I chose the Kräuterbrand, and Michelle got a cappuccino. The digestive was interesting, with tones of liquorice and some other vaguely familiar odours I couldn't put my finger on. Strong but nice.
The food had been so good and the waitress so cheerful and attentive that I decided a small tip would be in order, but was still unsure of the custom of how to actually provide it. So I interrupted the conversation of the guys next to us and said that he clearly knew more about German culture than us, could he please tell me the usual procedure for leaving the tip - does one just give the waitress extra and say keep it, or do you leave the extra on the table? He said firstly that it was entirely optional, unlike in the US, and that if we wanted to then the normal thing was to give the money to the waitress and tell her how much you wanted to pay overall - meal plus tip. So when we settled and the bill came to €21.15, I gave her €23 even and said, "Die rest is für Sie", at which she almost squealed in appreciation and gave us a very hearty send-off as we picked up and left. The guy, by the way, asked us where we were from, and was interested to learn Sydney because he'd spent 18 months in Melbourne at one stage and was returning to Australia later this year. We thanked him and said bye as we left the restaurant.
The next stop was the Sektfest, which was in full swing when we got there, with an acoustic guitar duo singing ballads from Simon and Garfunkel, and
others of a similar ilk, while tables of people chatted convivially and sipped wine bought from six or seven different manufacturers' tents spread around
the platz. We picked up a glass of rosé Sekt from one and a glass of chilled Eiswein from another, and shared sips from each as we watched the
twilight sky darken slowly over the scene of about 200 locals enjoying this small festival to the strains of the live music - as far as we could tell
we were the only tourists there at all. It was very nice and authentic feeling. The wines were both excellent - the rosé light and fruity, and
the eiswein sweet and syrupy, tasting like icy cold grape juice with only the barest hint of the alcohol in it. I took some photos of the festivities
and the floodlit Burg Klopp which looked down on the platz from its perch on the hill above.
Wines finished, we returned the glasses to collect our €1 deposit on each and then walked back to the hotel for the night.
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