June 11: Cologne
Our train to Cologne went by surprisingly fast. We took an ICE train through Bremen onto Cologne in about 4 hours. It was almost hard to believe but at one point we topped out at 250 km per hour or about 150 mph and it was completely smooth. The Dom in Cologne was enormous and dominated the city skyline. We found a hostel near the train station and then toured the Dom and climbed the stairs all the way to the top. Afterwards I decided to shave off Eurobeard 2.0 cause it was getting really scraggly and the mustache was beginning to grow over my lip. It took me half an hour to scrape the beard off my face leaving only a very creepy mustache. I stopped 2/3 of the way through to get a new razor cause the first had gone dull. Naturally we had to take pictures of the mustache since it was so hideous and creepy and you can find the whole album on Facebook... For dinner we did a grocery store run and got frozen pizzas and vegetables. When we got back to the hostel kitchen there were about 6 guys from India that were in there cooking indian food. We had to wait for them to finish using the stove but they gave us some of their food which was pretty good. Later we went out to a bar for some kolsch beer (umlaut over the o...) and watched the turks drive around honking their horns and waving turkish flags after their countries soccer game. On our way back to our room we met a guy from Argentina named Marcello who had gone to school in NYC. We wound up talking to him about all sorts of things (including how I supposedly look like Hillary Swank...haha) until about 3 in the morning.