Kölsche Sachen

Colognian things.

This is a completely beautiful city, a live architectural museum, and I´ve loved a lot of it. My teeny tiny hotel room (so European!) is only steps from the Domplatz (Cathedral Square, a public space par excellence, completely packed with every age group… I wish we had this sort of thing in Canada… imagine Stephen Ave during Stampede, but every single day). I´m trying to take it all in, but there´s so much to SEE. So it´s great. I´ve been inside lots of churches and seen Roman ruins and eaten lots and lots of massive Döner Kebabs. The weather has been hervorragend, which is to say splendid, and as I say my experience here has been exactly what I hoped for.

I leave tomorrow for Luxembourg and the new challenge of being in a French-speaking place for just three days, so let me also say some things about Köln (and who knows, maybe this applies to Westphalia in general). First and foremost, the smoking situation is beyond disgusting. I remember complaining a LOT about the smoking in Buenos Aires, but at least there there were many big restos that had, sometimes, logically placed nonsmoking areas. Sometimes not, but escaping smoke seemed, and I can´t believe I am saying this about 2004 BsAs, to be easier than in Köln. See, aside from McDonald´s, I have not found a single nonsmoking AREA, never mind a nonsmoking resto. I´ll peer inside a little resto with five or six tables, closed windows, and there is an ashtray on every table. I´ve been lucky to have good weather and to be able to sit outside here and there, and since I´m here alone, eating in a stand-up Imbiss, preferably one serving delectable Turkish snacks, is not that horrible. But if the weather were bad… I don´t even want to imagine this vacation, seriously. Frankfurt was already smoke free for the most part and I didn´t think it would be THIS different here in Köln, and that part really, really, really, really sucks.

I met two cool Americans at the German-Roman Museum today, a man and woman the male half of which is also a prof and also on sabbatical, he from U of Illinois, and they said that Berlin wasn´t so bad smoking-wise. I hope this is true.

I also have to mention that there is a certain stereotypical German brusqueness that I see here that I didn´t notice in Frankfurt. For example, I tried to use the bathroom below the Domplatz, and like the public ones in Frankfurt Hbf, you have to pay to enter (this one was 50 cents- 1/100 Euro is a “cent”). I couldn´t get in because some poor man was having a hard time with the turnstile, and an unpleasant old crone who works there said “Blöd!” (”stupid!”) right in his face. I couldn´t believe this sort of impatient disrespect for tourists, but I´ve seen it elsewhere, especially when I struggle to figure the coins out. Maybe this sort of thing happens in Canada and the US too… I should pay closer attention.