July 04 - Maastricht to Cologne (Germany).

 July 04 - Maastricht to Cologne (Germany)

Travel day to Cologne 

On arrival by train you can’t help but be impressed by the first thing you see coming out of the station, the Kölner Dom (Cologne Cathedral), it’s enormous!  Only about 50 metres from the station entrance the sheer size and height of it just towers over everything nearby, and there’s a lot of everything nearby as well!  Although impressed with the actual size and architecture of the building itself, we’re far less so with the burghers of the city that allowed all sort of crap to be built alongside it!  There’s even a camera shop built up against one of the cathedral walls, it’s horrible.  Not a great first impression of the city. 

The walk to our accommodation, about 15 minutes from the station, only added to our initial thoughts on the city of Cologne, and that is that it’s filthy.  I’m sure part of this impression is the ‘big city’ feel, but honestly it looks like they need to employ teams of street sweepers to clean the place up a bit. 

Once booked into our accommodation we decided to go back to the cathedral to check it out properly.  

The cathedral, which was originally built to house the reliquaries of ‘The Three Magi’ is not as impressive as it could be as, unfortunately, it’s covered with tons of black grime (pollution) and this tends to mask a lot of the ornate architecture.  It’s a real shame as, being it’s a Unesco world heritage site, it really needs some serious work to return it to the standard it deserves. At the very least those industrious burghers could give it a good scrub! 🛁 😂

The interior however is in a much better condition, with the standouts being the enormous columns and some magnificent stained glass windows. Having some lovely mosaics and paintings as well, this is a very nice cathedral that could be even nicer after applying some TLC. 

Bottom L: The Shrine of the Three Magi