Frankfurt and Cologne

On my way to working in Amsterdam , I decided to take some time to investigate Frankfurt and Cologne as I had not had the chance to see either city yet (2 hours in Cologne on a Contiki tour doesn’t really count).

A few people had told me that Frankfurt was quite dull, so I had low expectations. The plan was to mainly use Frankfurt to recover from my flight and to have a bit of a walk around to see what the city had to offer.

I was pleasantly surprised. It is an easy city to find your way around and is quite pretty. From a sightseeing point of view, it doesn’t have the major highlights and drawcards of other German cities (it is much more modern – most of the “old” buildings are reconstructions after the war) but I really liked the way many of the old buildings had been rebuilt with a modern architectural twist.

There are also some crazy sculptures in Frankfurt that I found quite amusing.

Just in case you weren’t sure which currency to use:

and I’m really not sure why this guy was outside the Opera House… though the door in his beard is really intriguing…

The fight against jetlag meant I didn’t get a chance to explore the city’s nightlife and culture (there was nothing on in the Opera house that night, anyway…) but I certainly wouldn’t have a problem with spending time in Frankfurt again.

The train ride to Cologne the next day was really beautiful. I chose to take the slower train that travels along the banks of the Rhine, which is incredibly beautiful country. You can see why old German legends have the Rhine as the place where life on earth started. The landscape is incredibly green and lush. The train even went through St Goar (one of the stops on the Contiki tour last year) which brought back a whole lot of memories.

Cologne is dominated by its Cathedral, which really is an incredible building. Enormous but beautiful, especially on the inside. Like any of the big European cathedrals, though, swamped with tourists who really are quite noisy and disrespectful. A boys’ choir processed through the church to the choir stalls while I was there, so I thought I might have been lucky enough to hear some singing, too! Unfortunately, they were only there to practice lining up, standing, sitting and bowing, presumably for a performance later in the week.

The Ludwig Museum is quite a famous contemporary art museum and this is where I spent most of the afternoon. It has a sizeable collection of PopArt with a number of works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein as well as lots of Picasso and German Expressionism (I finally wrote down the names of a few of my favourite German artists that have always stood out in these exhibitions – the painter Kirchner and the sculptor Barlach). The museum is surprisingly large and I was either still jetlagged or just not up to my normal level of museum fitness, so I struggled through a lot of this gallery, especially the very contemporary works.

Probably the most amusing part of the collection is an outside sculpture which is a modern reinterpretation of Michelangelo’s David. Germans and their crazy sculptures!

After a bit of a wander around the older parts of Cologne and some ancient churches, the jet lag got hold of me again and it was nap time for me followed by dinner and an early night, despite the best intentions of going out to check out a piano bar I’d found earlier.

One thing I am finding really interesting is how late it is still light – usually around 10pm and then the sun seems to be up again at around 4am. This will take some getting used to, I think!