My next and final visitor in Cologne was none other than my brother Chris. He had luckily chosen to visit me after I had finished working, and so we would have lots of time to see not just Cologne but a few other bits of Europe as well. We started off by exploring downtown Cologne, which was now much easier from the new apartment since it no longer necessitated any subway rides. The main station, the cathedral, the old town, the river front, all were just a short walk away and so we took our time. It was nice not having to rush, if we decided to have a long lunch and miss our appointed tour time at the cathedral, that was no problem, Chris was staying for the better part of two weeks.
World Cup was also in full swing by this time, and we made sure to catch the games every day in between grocery shopping, cooking and enjoying caf� life. The great thing about world cup time in Cologne, and likely in any cosmopolitan city, is that you can always find a crowd of nationals cheering on every team, and whoever wins, you can find a party somewhere. One day when Chris and I were looking for a place to have lunch, we came across a part of town with a succession of Irish pubs, they all looked too busy to serve food though as they were jam packed with fans cheering on Ireland against Spain. We ate quickly at a place down the street and were going to drop back into a pub when I realized that we wouldn�t be able to see the end of the game and still be on time to meet Michelle back in the old town. So we walked for fifteen minutes and kept up to date on the score since just about every restaurant keeps a television outside during the tournament. We saw that Spain was winning by the time we met Michelle, and so stopped at the next Spanish bar to watch the game. In a demonstration of national support the bar was only serving Spanish beer that afternoon so San Miguel it was. Ireland fought back to tie the match just before the whistle at full time. Fickle people that we are, we briefly considered heading back to an Irish place, but perhaps the San Miguel had already made it�s way too far into our systems and so we stayed to cheer Spain on as they eventually triumphed in the most brutal decision making process in sports, the shootout. Several hours later and quite a long way from the bar, we saw our bartender, draped in the Spanish flag leading a small parade of people in celebration through the streets. It�s a great time of year.
Cologne is a great place to live, but not the most exciting place to visit. Having been absolutely pulverized during the war, it doesn�t have the same architectural charm as many other cities, and so I soon took Chris a little farther afield, to the low lying countries. After a long and somewhat tedious discussion of what we wanted to see, and how much it would cost to do what, we finally settled on a plan that would see Chris and I take the train to Amsterdam on Thursday morning, stay for two nights and then travel to Brussels where we would meet up with Michelle and finally travel to Bruge as a group of three before ending up back in Cologne in time for Michelle to go to work on Monday.
I had learned a few things about Amsterdam from the last time I�d visited. For starters, it seems to be the one place that every tourist in Europe can agree on visiting. Secondly, that the UK has so many discount, hour-long flights to Amsterdam that it is swamped by Brits on the weekends Finally, there is limited accommodation at reasonable rates, a fact which when combined with my first two bits of knowledge drove us to visit on a Thursday. There was a light rain falling on the city when we stepped off the train in Amsterdam�s huge central station, so we decided to start out trip off by settling into our hostel. We walked across the street into the tourist welcome centre and were quickly booked into a two bedroom discount hotel room for a lower rate than I had paid the last time to share a hostel room with seven strangers on my last trip. Things were working out well. The clouds had cleared by the time we emerged from out temporary accommodations, and we decided to walk over to the neighbouring Vincent Van Gogh museum. Van Gogh�s name is actually a good introduction to the lingua franca. It is pronounced with such rolling of the tongue and harshly coughed consonants that one wonders if the English phlegm comes from very name of the Dutch language, Flemish. I don�t think I�ve ever been to another museum of such size whose primary collection consists of the works of a single artist. The museum was interesting and is organized so as to try and tell the life story of Van Gogh alongside a selection of chronologically ordered paintings.
We left directly from the museum in search of dinner, and after what ended up being a rather thorough tour of the area, settled on a small Indonesian restaurant. Just like in Britain, the domestic food market of the former colonists has been invaded by the colonies. I have never seen so many Indonesian restaurants. I had also not had the chance to eat such a good meal as we had that evening for a quite some time. I think we must have spent nearly two hours picking away at the generous portions and sampling the local Dutch beer. I think my brother kept a tally of the varieties of beer he managed to try during his holiday, it must be impressive. On that note, we weren�t ready to call it a night just then, and turned towards the red lights downtown. It hadn�t been long since I�d last been out in Amsterdam, but I still didn�t know anywhere in particular to go. We wandered through the streets, and I was happy to find them free of the crushing, claustrophobia- inducing crowds that seem to dominate in the summer months, coming on Thursday was definitely the right choice. We settled on a small bar with a patio until the temperature dipped below comfortable, and we started to make our way home.
Friday morning, the clouds of the previous day had melted away and we were treated to sunshine. We walked through the large park near our hotel in the direction of the Rijks museum. The last time I had visited, I had spent most of my time in an exhibit of Dutch history. This time, I knew how big the museum was and all the other things it had to offer, so we had a lot more time to pass through the halls of great Dutch paintings and sculpture at a comfortable speed. For lunch we decided to take advantage of the weather and try local food at a patio restaurant. I had a large Dutch pancake, rather like a thick crepe the size of a dinner plate, with ham and cheese. Chris had a gigantic sandwich, the house specialty. Now, it was still World Cup time, and even though we�d left Germany, I had to watch the German team defeat the US. It was also our chance to try Amstel beer. From the pub we had stopped at we went back into the streets and simply walked through the city at length, taking pictures of the canals and houseboats, stopping to hear the glockenspiel of a church, pass by the Anne Frank museum and generally enjoy the afternoon. After dinner we made our way downtown and could already feel the increased numbers of people on the streets, the number of young people with huge packs and suitcases betrayed their recent arrival. Of course, that didn�t stop us from having another good night out, but I think we, or at least I was really starting to slow down from what in retrospect had been a very busy two weeks, and we were early in coming back to the hotel.
