Cologne (Koln) Day 2 – 29 July 2012

Ralph here.  Perhaps because they don’t observe Daylight Saving Time here, sunrise is very early.  It is nearly light out by 5:45 am and as a result I am waking up, without an alarm, much earlier than I would otherwise.  [This is not a problem I have experienced.]  So I was surprised when I woke up at 5:30 am on Sunday.  I waited around for an hour then went for a 11-mile run through Cologne.  Conditions were nearly perfect – clear, with temperatures in the mid-50s.  The streets were pretty much empty except for a few runners and hangers-on from Saturday night drinking. [Photo of Ralph running the streets of Cologne below.]

[Down on the right in the white shirt.]

 Yes, that is a gigantic inverted ice-cream cone

sunrise with the double-peaked Cologne Cathedral on the left

For better or worse, many stores and restaurants are closed all day Sunday, and those that are open have very limited hours.  So we realized that Sunday was going to be pretty slow.  We walked from our hotel to the Document Center, a museum about the Third Reich housed in a former SS and Gestapo prison.

Near the start of the Nazi rise to power, the Gestapo rented a house in Cologne and converted the basement into a prison, with the above-ground floors being used for offices.  After World War II it sat empty, and the prison was being used for storage, until the 1980s when the city of Cologne decided to turn it all into a museum.  All of the signage is in German but we rented one of those handheld audio guides that are pretty common in museums now, which narrated the rooms in English.  The basement prison was pretty disturbing.  It was intended as an interrogation prison – the Gestapo or SS would keep someone there a few days for either release them or send them elsewhere.  Because it was just a converted house, there were only about ten cells of 4 feet by 10 feet, and it was designed for one or two prisoners apiece.  However, some people were kept there for weeks or months at a time so by the end of the war, there were as many as 30 prisoners in each cell, with very little sanitation. [No photos allowed – but I doubt we would have taken any anyway.  The prisoners were not penalized for writing on the walls of their cells.  As such the walls were covered with thier writings.  They had been left on the walls and all visible writings have been transcribed.  Numerous attempts to ascertain what was written on previous layers has failed.  In some cases, these writings offer the only insight into what some people experienced.]

We were pretty spent after that but decided we would try again to see the inside of the Cologne Cathedral.  We saw the area immediately inside the Cathedral, but were not allowed any farther because it was Sunday and they had Mass frequently through the day.  We then walked to the nearby bridge, locked our lock onto the fence, and threw the key into the river.  Some passersby wished us “good luck” in English (we must give off the American tourist rays).  Also, I saw one guy working to unlock a padlock that was chained to the fence.

[Ralph with our lock.]

We headed back toward our hotel, again passing through the shopping area.  It was significantly more subdued than on Saturday.  For lunch, we ate French-bread pizzas from a street vendor.  Lynnae thought they were gross, but I was fine with it. [They were gross.  Even Ralph said they were mediocre.  That’s how bad they were.  We sat in the square eating them and watching the various street performers.  There were more than we had seen previously, or maybe they were just more noticable since the crowds were smaller.]  That pretty much ended our day.

• Cologne
• Europe
• Germany
• Holocaust
• Koln
• military
• Space-A
• travel