I got a brief visit from an old friend the other day. I've known Andy Graves since I was three years old. Our parents lived in the same neighbourhood twenty years ago, and although my family has moved in and out of Ottawa, we've always been in that same part of Ottawa South. Currently, our two families live across the street from each other. Neither Andy nor I have actually lived in Ottawa during the last few years as we both went to out of town universities, but we always met up over holidays, this time, we would meet on completely new ground, in Cologne.
Andy was on his way back to France where he was currently studying from a trip to Munich, and was going to stay the night in Cologne to pay a visit and break up the otherwise long train trip. I went with Michelle to meet him at the station, a task complicated by our lack of foresight and failure to set a meeting point. I tried to meet him on the platform, but we missed each other and hen eventually Michelle bumped into him at a phone booth.
It was already mid-evening by this time, and so we decided to head directly to the old city and drop into a pub. We passed by the cathedral lit up with blue light, walked by the Roman museum with its old stone columns and bits of statue gathered along its side, along the old Roman road and down to the banks of the Rhine. We shunned the overly touristy (i.e. pricey) bars and walked into the Heumarkt to our destination, a very Cologne bar. You walk through a heavy blackout curtain into a wood paneled, smoke filled room. Stained glass windows at the front depict scenes of Carnival, and the establishment serves its own particular brew of the local K�lsch beer in the traditional tall thin glasses. We started off at a standing only table, but as it was Sunday night, the crowds began to thin, and we moved to a table.
It had been a couple of months since Michelle and I had been home, and talking with Andy was like spending a day at home. Putting a finger on Canadian speech, isolating individual words and phrases that are uniquely Canadian is extremely difficult, but it was easy to tell that Andy was Canadian. We had a long conversation about what we were all doing, about living in Europe and traveling, and also about the idiosyncrasies that Michelle and I had noticed about the Germans. It was just a good night out. We made our way home on the rather slow Sunday night subway service, and tried to prepare Andy for a little self touring in the morning as we both had to go to work.
