Cologne, 14 Oct 2019
For our last day in Cologne, we did probably the most popular tourist attractions, the Cologne Cathedral and the Chocolate Museum. While there were quite a few people at each, it’s easy to imagine how they could be so much more crowded.
For the previous few nights, there was quite a bit of noise in the middle of the night. As we got back to the hostel, there were a bunch of guys with luggage at the front desk. Since it was after dinner, they could have been checking in, but they might have been checking out.
We heard nothing through the night, but it’s hard to know whether we slept better because it was quiet or that we had mostly caught up with the time change. Either way, it was a positive change.
Breakfast was very quiet; we may have been the first people there. After that, it was time to play tourist.
As we were walking to the cathedral, we saw a woman sitting on a motorcycle and a man was taking her picture. Soon after, she hurriedly got off the motorcycle and they ran away. I wonder how often they do that.
Cologne Cathedral
Our first order of business was to climb the cathedral’s south tower. It seemed a bit cruel that the entrance is a level below the plaza, making you go down before going up.
We started up the narrow spiral staircase, which went up about 400 steps to the belfry, where in the middle was Fat Peter. At 24 tons, it’s the world’s largest free-swinging church bell. The other bells were no slouches, either.
Another 100 steps up we got to the observation level where we were treated with great views of the city. One interesting building from above was Museum Ludwig, which has rows upon rows of what were the inverse of the skylights we saw inside. Those overshadowed any mechanicals, which normally are the most prominent features of rooftops.
Having made it all around the spire, we started down. While we only saw one or two groups in the way up and at the top, several groups going up which we passed in the way down. We were glad to have gotten an early start.
Having finished the tower, we proceeded inside to take a look. While the outside had lots of human-scale elements combined on an inhumanly-large scale, the inside was just inhumanly large. The ceiling is 140 feet high, and there is enough stained glass to cover the football fields.
The church was completed in the late 19th century but was begun in the 13th century. The altar and behind, including the choir, in use from the early 14th century but the section was walled off and lack of funds stopped construction for 300 years. The Prussians threw a lot of money and labor into finishing the project in less than 40 years.
The cathedral was begun because the acquisition of the bones of the Three Kings (yes, the Magi) justified the secular power of the German King, bringing in enough money to justify such a grand building. The Shrine of the Magi, along with the Gero-Crucifix (carved in the 10th century) and the sculpture Madonna of Milan (from the late 13th century) are major pilgrimage destinations in the cathedral.
Lunch
Ready for a break, we went back to the room and started doing laundry. Since there would probably be no laundry services available in the next couple of cities, the last day in Cologne seemed to be a good time to do it. When it was time to dry, we moved the clothes over and went to the hostel restaurant for lunch.
When we started the dryer, it said it would be about 40 minutes, but it ended up being close to an hour. Even so, when we checked the clothes, they seemed damp, so we ran it a bit more. After that, most things were dry except some items which we just hung to dry. After that, we were ready to head out again.
Imhoff Chocolate Museum
We headed out towards the Rhine and walked along the water until we saw the rather imposing Imhoff-Schokoladenmuseum, the chocolate museum. You get a small piece as you enter, and that’s not the last piece you will get. When you first enter the museum, you see exhibits about the cacao tree and fruit, and even get a chance to try the seeds. You can definitely taste different floral and spice notes in the different varieties. There’s also a small greenhouse where they’re growing various tropical plants, including different species of cacao trees.
At the end of the first floor is a small-scale chocolate factory where you can watch the various stages of chocolate production. The most fun sections are where molds are filled and the robots which sport the grid of completed squares into a stream of them which then go through a packaging robot. Before packaging, you can press a button which causes a robot to pick a piece off the production line into your hand. At the end of that room of a chocolate fountain where an attendant takes wagers, dips them, and hands them out to eager visitors.
Directly above the transparent factory is a section where you can watch workers decorate custom bars; we saw a white chocolate bar being studded with gummi bears. There were some other machines, including one that continuously rotated molds for hollow chocolate.
The rest of the museum covered the history of chocolate in general and of German-made chocolate. After we were done, we made a beeline to the café to have drinking chocolate and a soufflé. We're used to being served 8 ounces of drinking chocolate, but what we got was larger enough that we would have been able to split one between us. That didn’t stop us from finishing them, though.
The last stop was the gift shop where we picked up, obviously, some chocolate. On the way back to our room, we picked up a small quiche to split for dinner (between the rather large lunch and the chocolate, we weren’t very hungry) and settled in for the rest of the night.
