Cologne (Köln), Germany

Call it Köln or Cologne, it's where we went last weekend.

about 2.5 hours drive from home

Daphne's teacher has encouraged his students to ask their parents to take them to Deutschland when they go on holiday so they can practice their German.  Well, we Ts are nothing but a bunch of people-pleasing teacher's pets, so off to Germany we went on our weekend off from church music!

Daphne was our trusty interpreter.  She did a wonderful job ordering all our food, asking loads of questions for us, and even scheduling a museum tour over the phone.

pleased

The main attraction in Cologne has to be its impressive gothic cathedral.  It was very crowded and quite loud inside, but gorgeous nonetheless.

sunlight through the stained glass was creating rainbows on the walls, but a photo can't do it justice

I learned about the heavy bombing of Cologne in WWII.  Many postcards in the tourist shops depicted photos such as these.

source: wikipedia

The city center has a large pedestrian-only area (which we always appreciate) and the architecture is "modern," as most of the city was rebuilt after the war.

We visited Cologne's modern art museum, Museum Ludwig

There were quite a few Picassos.  James likes audio guides more than the rest of us.

We also saw a very disturbing exhibit with videos of pianos being violently destroyed.

Here's one being beaten and one falling off a building.  Ah, art.

On a lighter note, Daphne's been reading a book in school called "Moritz in der Litfaßsäule."  A Litfaßsäule, we learned, is a type of advertising pillar covered with event posters that was invented in Germany.  In the book, Moritz runs away from home, taking up residence inside one of these hollow structures.

Daphne was soon spotting Litfaßsäule-s (Litfaßsäulen??) all around the city.

We took photos and sent them to the teacher.  A family of teacher's pets, I'm tellin' ya!

Another highlight from the trip was tracking down some pretty darn good burritos.

So far Germany gets the best score for burritos in our travels to our neighboring countries.

And the last place we went before heading back to Luxembourg was the fragrance museum.

Eau de Cologne, to be precise

The museum is actually a guided tour of the original shop and factory site, given by an actor dressed up as the 18th century perfume maker, who was originally from Italy but settled in Cologne.  Our tour was in English, very interactive, and definitely worth the 10€ total admission for our family.

we were only permitted to take photos and the beginning and end

You can watch a short video about it here:

Free sample of the original formula for each of us.  Accept no imitations!  By the way, Eau de Cologne is gender- neutral

And they threw in this book.  What a steal!

It seems like we packed a lot into our one night stay, but really I probably just take too many pictures.

my 3