It had been a couple of weeks by now since I'd seen Michelle, and this weekend she was coming to Cologne. What to do, where to go? We opted for culture, and chocolate. One of the oldest chocolate companies in Germany was founded in Cologne, and in the honour of this time honoured tradition, there is an entire museum devoted to the history of chocolate. Lured by curiosity and the promise of free samples, we took the train to the chocolate museum, and were surprised even before going into the building, the thing is huge! And we soon found out why, it houses the complete machinery necessary to turn raw cocoa into wrapped chocolates and truffles. You start with a few displays that show how cocoa is actually harvested, from really huge melon/pod things, by hand. You crack these foot long pods open and take out the beans, they are then left to dry and ferment. Then you can watch the beans get crushed and moved from machine to machine. (they all have glass sides). Eventually the melted chocolate is poured into individual moulds and picked up by a robotic arm which passes them to a wrapping machine. But, there is another more interesting output, the melted chocolate also flows straight to a giant fountain where it flows like water. They then take wafers cookies and dip them into the fountain, coating them with still warm chocolate. Delicious.
The next day we looked at a more traditional museum, the German Museum of Roman History. Just a few metres from Cologne's massive cathedral, a giant Roman mosaic was unearthed in the early 1940s during construction of a bomb shelter. The mosaic survived the war and a museum featuring Cologne's Roman origins was erected around it. Inside you can see what Cologne looked like 2000 years ago, when it was a colony of the Roman empire.
After spending so much time indoors, we decided to do something a little more fitting for the sunny weather we had until now, only glimpsed from museum windows. We decided to leave the big city and take the train to Bonn. We walked along the city's narrow downtown streets until we came upon a tiny restaurant just off the main market square. As we ate a late lunch, we noticed a group of musicians start to set up shop on the other side of the street, and realized that they had been playing outside of the Roman museum in Cologne, we took it as a sign that Bonn was definitely the place to be today, and so it was. Not long after we finished, a concert started in the market square. An international orchestra was playing to mark the occasion of the global climate talks that had been held in Bonn earlier in the day. A few chairs had been set up for the concert, but we had arrived far too late for that. Instead we sat down next to the large statue of Beethoven in the centre of the square, and settled in to listen to the music in the shadow of it's composer. The concert was short it seemed to early to go home, but then they announced that a jazz group would be taking the stage next. What a perfect way to usher in the night.
