Viva Colognia!

Ahh, Cologne. I have a special place in my heart for Cologne.

Part of it is because of the towering and fantastic cathedral, which never ceases to be breathtaking no matter how many times I see it. The Kölner Dom is one of my favorite churches that I've ever visited, in large part because when I was here for the first time, it was a sanctuary of quiet and calm in the middle of the chaos of Karneval.

Part of it is memories of visiting the city during Karneval: the nuns wearing bandoliers of hard liquor, the schunkling and singing, the ankle-deep drifts of broken glass littering the streets, the complete insanity of a parade of clowns banging through the Hauptbahnhof and getting odd looks for not wearing a psychedelically colored costume, watching a Chinese grandma beat up a towering, drunken German dressed like a surgeon who was trying to muscle his way into his restaurant's bathroom and bullying her employees. I love Cologne.

This time, of course, it was much quieter. Our bus from Frankfurt Hahn was delayed by a horrible traffic jam caused by a triathalon along the Rhine, so it was midafternoon already when I staggered into the hostel. I headed out again to a flea market in Neumarkt and looked in the shop windows, but many of the stores were already closed. I wandered down to the bank of the river and, while examining a water sculpture in a park, was approached by a Frenchman who struck up a conversation and asked me out for coffee. (Why does this keep happening? Odd...)

I met up with him a couple hours later, and we got some coffee, sat outside at a cafe overlooking a brightly lit square, and chatted for hours about language, culture, travel, stereotypes, and life in general. Fouad, my new friend, was very gentlemanlike, and we spoke in a combination of German and English, sprinkled with French and, when I could coax it out of Fouad, Moroccan or Arabic. As it got later, I insisted on going back to my hostel and getting a good night's sleep for the beginning of orientation the next day, so Fouad and I walked back past the cathedral and I returned to my room to crash.

I got up, did my laundry, and spent a few hours wandering around the city, looking for a Caffrey hat in the fashionable streets of Cologne. I ended up with something significantly more on the Michael Jackson side, but hey, I like it, so don't judge. At about 3pm, I picked up my bags and lugged them to the train station to meet up with the Altenberg group.

The hour-long bus ride to the conference center was not that eventful, but the key thing is that finally, I'm beginning the thing I've been waiting for and looking forward to for so long. Now all that remains is for the excitement to turn into nervousness.