Today (12/6/2019) we made it to the major Rhine city of Cologne. We had a neat but distant view of the cathedral from our ship the previous night when we pulled in and docked. The next morning we took a short bus ride into town which dropped us off right near the massive Cologne Cathedral. We toured around inside which is quite neat due to it’s massive size – the second largest in Europe, ahead of Strasbourg’s Notre Dame, and behind only the cathedral in Ulm. After that made out way to see the bone room in St. Ursula’s church – a church with a room off to the side that has thousands of bones and skulls stacked up, though it was closed.

After that we made our way south to visit… the Chocolate Museum! A neat museum showing all the wonders of chocolate, it’s origins and how it’s made! Mmmmmm… It was raining gently for most all the day but it was never really a problem since it was light and scattered. After the museum we had made our way to the beautiful Christmas Markets of Cologne. It has 3 unique markets, each with a different theme! A harbor/nautical themed market, a neat fairy tale themed market full of gnomes – it also had a large ice skating rink, as well as a few lanes for curling, and the main general market at the base of the cathedral. They were all very beautiful and quite nicely decorated. The neat thing about the markets is every city has a unique decorated and shaped mug for drinking the local drinks – Glühwein – seasoned and heated wine, hot chocolate and other drinks! Some are shaped like little mugs, some like neat round pots, one mug we got from Freiburg is shaped like a snowman! And so far we have collected one from every city, except Zürich which only had generic paper cups.

After we finished going through the markets we made our way back to the ship!

Images from Cologne!