Rhine River - Day 5 - Sailing and Cologne

In the morning we had gotten through the Rhine Canal leaving Amsterdam and were on the Rhine River itself.

A German ferry boat.

The Rhine River is the busiest cargo river in all of Europe.  Unfortunately that means a lot of pollution and disturbance of natural plants and fish.  They made some progress in the last decade but unfortunately a lot of native fish have been lost forever.

And then the boat started coming past Dusseldorf.

A lot of people like to walk there dogs along the levees of the river ... and the dogs seem to enjoy it too.

Sheep seem to enjoy it too, although we weren't close enough to hear what a sheep "baaaaaa" sounds like in german.

Finally, by late afternoon we started getting close to the destination city of Cologne.

We started a walking tour of the city at 4 PM, which is close to dark in this part of the world.  Fortunately I brought our good camera which does a really good job of compensating for low light conditions.

The narrow cobblestone streets of Cologne.  The church at the end is known as the small church.  It becomes apparent why in a while.

The big attraction to Germany this time of year is the "Christmas Markets".  Almost all towns have them and this one had a total of 6.  They're basically December flea markets/festivals for selling local arts, crafts, food, and, of course, drinks.

This is the big cathedral seen from behind another one of the Christmas Markets.  The building of this cathedral was started in 1250 and officially finished in the 1700's. The cathedral was started based on an arch-bishop bringing a box of bones to Cologne which he claimed were the bones from the 3 Wise Men.  Back in the 13th century if an arch-bishop tell you it's the bones of the 3 Wise Men evidently you buy into it.  The Catholic church did some studies on the bones sometime recently and was relieved to find out they were at least human bones.  :)

This is the front of the cathedral.  It's an amazing piece of architecture.  It was bombed 14 times during WW II but never fell down and was able to be repaired.  Most of the rest of Cologne was totally decimated.  This might have been bombed more but both the Allies and the Germans used it as an easily recognizable landmark when flying over the Rhine River to know where they were.

The inside of the cathedral.

There's a couple we've gotten to be friends with from New Zealand. We stopped by a local beer hall to enjoy the local German beer.

The happy couple at the end of the night.

Until the next post, happy happy from Germany.