Cologne and Arrival in Hamburg

June 11^th

We all slept in since we hadn’t arrived back to our hotel until very late the night before.  After dropping off our bags at the train station we started to walk around Cologne for a bit.  First we checked out the Cologne Cathedral and took a look inside.  We decided not to take a tour of the cathedral because we had all seen and been on too many tours to cathedrals in our travels in Europe and they all kind of seem the same after a while.  Instead we just walked around until we found a nice restaurant to eat lunch.

I ordered a bockwurst made of horse meat, a curywurst and some Kolsch beer.  I first began with the horse sausage which was very delicious, shortly after I had started eating it the waiter came to the table with a smile and dropped off two square nails on the table and told me these were from the horse that I was eating; the nails that hold the shoes on the hooves.  This definitely gave me a chuckle.  After lunch we got some ice cream and continued to walk around until we had to head to the train station to take a train to Hamburg.

We arrived in Hamburg in the late evening and had Alex, our German Foreign exchange student from high school was there to pick us up (Alex is a law student in Hamburg).  We were there no longer than fifteen minutes and we were already saying cheers over some beers to us finally being united in Europe.  Shorty after that Anna, Alex’s long term girlfriend arrived and we all went out to eat at an Indian restaurant.  We ended the night with a few beers and good conversation before retiring for the evening.