On Saturday (yesterday) I went to Cologne on a City Trip organised by Tafelstraat. The preparation had been rather chaotic (understatement) as the date and goal (Cologne) had been set a month ago, but no one had been assigned to organise it. So nothing had really been done until this Thursday, when Germa and I volunteered to do so. Which really isn't enough time.
Nevertheless, with 13 people on the trip (two of which didn't show up) we had a nice group of multi-national people, from the Netherlands (three), Brazil (three), the US (two), Singapore/Malaysia (one), Armenia (one) and Bulgaria (one). Steffen, Linda's boyfriend, also joined us during the day, as he had been visiting a friend in Marburg and he passed through Cologne anyway.
So, my impressions of the city made during this very short visit:
Cologne is big. Very big. With something like 1.1 million inhabitants it is bigger than any city in the Netherlands. Its historical centre is also very large, and I didn't get to see some very touristic and famous parts of the city, like the town hall and some of the market squares. It's just so large and despite using the underground to save time there was too much to see. Still though, I think I went to the right spots; my impression of the touristic centre (the Dom and adjacent areas) is that it is simply overcrowded with camera-wielding tourists. There's also a lot of noise, which makes being there a little tiresome (particularly if you have to keep any eye out on eleven group members who might be trailing behind taking photographs).
Despite its size and tourist overload it was nevertheless charming and quite inviting. The people there were generally friendly, although there were more drunks and homeless people hanging around than there would be over here (partly, I think, because we generally tend to arrest them if they hang around in city centres). There was also quite a bit of trash lying around, moreso than over here; then again, it was comparable to most Belgian, German, French and British cities I've been to. It made me remember something international students once told me: they thought Dutch cities were excessively clean and well-kept, and thought it actually made them look bad.
Also, Cologne has a considerable part left of their medieval city walls; I visited the gatehouse just to the north-west of the St Kunibert Church, with the Kölner Boor on it; also large tracts of the wall in the south part of the city, which had been creatively converted into apartments. It looked really cool, and ensured the structures still had a real use. Very neat idea.
The Dom (Cologne's famous cathedral), on the other hand, was rather overhyped. Its main point of interest seemed to be that it was fecking massive; but architecturally speaking it was just a pretty standard cathedral enlarged ten times. And from the inside it was largely empty, with no interesting effigies to admire; there's many more interesting churches than this one, such as the church of St Georg, which we visited later during the day. It was quite a small but charming Romanesque church with some nice and very old carving work still there. Can't say I liked the triptych much, though; it was either fake-medieval or by a mediocre medieval artist.
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