The Blog

   Hanging out at the Physikzentrum...

Okay, so I'm not sure if it's true what they say about the second day being worse for jetlag or if I was just having a bad day but this morning sucked. It started out reasonable, even though I couldn't find anyone to sit with me at breakfast in the youth hostel because both my roomies disappeared not long after I woke up.

Oh, I should mention the youth hostel. It was the Koeln-Rhiel (*check this spelling, Catherine*) youth hostel, which was about ten minutes by train from the city centre. It was surprisingly hard to find, given that it was signposted, but I didn't walk in the wrong direction, it just took a lot of peering through the trees to find it. I took some photos, so I will upload them at some point or maybe just point Wikitravel in the right direction.

Anyway, it was very pretty, and the staff all spoke english, which was pleasant. I find that when I've heard nothing but other people speaking another language all day I start talking out loud to myself, which is no fun as I always know what I'm about to say. I found an internet terminal in the hostel, which boasted 5euro/min, but the last thirty seconds are dominated by a large countdown clock in the middle of the screen, so I put in a large coin rather than suffer that again. The keyboard was a shocker, though, which is why I didn't blog. My poor friends had to put up with that in emails though, but they love me, so it's all good.

What else happened...? I went to the Dom (Cathedral) treasury in Koeln yesterday and gawked at all the shiny pretty gold things in the glass cases, and admired the big box which apparently has the bones of the three kings of the bible story in it. I'm glad I did this yesterday, as today when I went to go to mass in the church proper this morning they wouldn't let me in. Apparently Jesus is allergic to suitcases. Whatever, I don't need their stinking religion anyway...

Okay, so I sat in a corner and cried for an hour pathetically because I'd never heard of a church that didn't let people in before, even if I get special travellers 'get out of church free' cards. And I did want to see the inside, and I wanted to go to mass and had been feeling nicely righteous because I had looked up the mass times beforehand so I would be there on time and everything. *grumbles*

So then I went for a wander around the shops, but they were all closed because it's sunday. Fair enough, I guess. I found a few souvenier places that were open, and got Heidi a present, but for the most part I wandered the streets with a bunch of other people looking in all the windows. I found two antikmarkts (and I know that's spelled wrong, but not by much and I can look it up later) which were fun to look around... but I didn't buy anything because it was all junk. One of the markets was set up inside a normal mall, but instead of the shops being open, in the walkways between the shops there were lots of tressle tables with random collections of necklaces, knick-knacks, and elvis presley records.

I had a slice of pizza for lunch (and wow was it the best thing I've ever eaten, for some reason) and then I went on a grand adventure on the german train system. I learned many important things, such as "aussen Sa" means "but not on sunday, because you don't need more than one train an hour" and that all the trains arrive at remote stops at the same time, so you have to wait an hour for the next one because without teleportation you can't get to the other platform.

But now I'm here, at the Physikzentrum Bad Honnef and I'm about to run to dinner. Will be back later (possibly tomorrow, given how tired I am).

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