Friday 6/3 in Cologne

Designing dresses in the am.

I'm way behind and would like to hammer this out....

In the morning our plan was to go to the Botanical Garden, but due to near-mutinous conditions, I decided that we would stay closer to the apartment.  We did a bit of shopping in the morning and in addition to some food, we picked up new journals.  After dropping off the food, we went to a bit of forested green space near the institute to do projects.  I knitted and the girls designed wedding dresses in their journals.  Their designs follow a standard dress template, but with all sorts of variety in the embellishments and images on the dresses.  I'll see about getting some examples of these up on the blog at some point.

In front of the Cathedral.

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Andrea came back from the institute at noon and we did the bus/train thing to Cologne.  Cologne is a completely different sort of place from Bonn.  There is tons of activity and it is good for just hanging out.  We started in front of the cathedral just watching people.  We then did a tour of the cathedral and it is massive.  Super huge.  The Three Wise Men have some bones enshrined here and in addition to all sorts of shiny things and stone statues and tombs there is a large carved crucifix with Jesus on it that dates from the 900's.  It is claimed to be the oldest carved crucifix in Europe.  It was sublime.  (Since the British use that word all of the time - usually when talking about some athlete - I thought I would try it out.)  A highlight of the cathedral is the Gerhard Richter window which was dedicated in 2007.  Image here.  


We took a break after the church and stopped for ice cream in its shadow.  The girls got some huge snowmen and Andrea got some ice cream in the form of spaghetti.  I got something to drink.

A museum was the next stop and we were treated to all sorts of cool pop-art stuff (Lichtenstein, Warhol, Johns and others who I can't remember) and other funky things including a wonderful Dali which was quite similar in emotion to the Christ painting we saw of his in Glasgow.  Ludwig Museum!


Train back.  It was only 20 minutes back, but we joined the party.