When you first step out of the doors of the train station in Köln, one of the most spectacular gothic cathedrals in Germany towers overhead, just a few steps away to the left. If you turn to the right you’re likely to find a long line of beige Mercedes taxis, the sides plastered with gaudy advertisements for Pascha, Europe’s largest brothel… a twelve story highrise. These things together sum up Cologne pretty nicely.
I arrived around dinner time on a Monday, and decided to walk to my hotel to get the lay of the land, though it ended up taking me nearly an hour with my luggage. After spending the previous days in picturesque Austria and Switzerland, Cologne was a bit of a letdown. I began seeing homeless people and beggars, and a sign outside the station warned of pick-pockets.
Perhaps the events of the day were overshadowing my experience, too. I woke up in the morning to walk to the train station, about a 20 minutes walk, and was almost immediately caught in a downpour that lasted the duration of my walk. I stepped into the Dornbirn station completely drenched, my socks soaked, my hair dripping, my shirt sticking to the skin of my back and chest like Saran wrap. I hoped that my suitcase was water resistant (it did pretty well), and that my camera backpack, a ThinkTank Shape Shifter, was as water resistant as I expected (it wasn’t… but I also didn’t stop to put on its rain-fly. My fault).
But when I arrived, the fellows at my hotel were very friendly, the room was fine, and the attached cafe was comfy, and I settled in and began to enjoy the city.
For the next few days, I woke every morning and took the subway to the Köln Messe for Photokina, and in the evenings, I’d take the subways back to my hotel and wander around looking for something interesting for dinner. With one exception, I settled on Turkish every night (very good, and also cheap), but there was a lot of diversity: Greek, Chinese, Vietnamese, and of course, lots of German and Turkish.
On Thursday, I decided to skip Photokina (mostly) for a day, and instead spend some time looking around the city and taking pictures. I was somewhat deterred by the fact that Germany, like many European nations, has much more stringent privacy laws than the USA, so a great deal of street photography is practically illegal1 This is according to the only articles that I was able to find on the topic, which were about three years old. According to these articles, you need to get consent to photograph anyone in public. Germans believe that their right to control their own public includes the right to not be photographed . I wasn’t going to let it stop me completely, but I did have to be a little less conspicuous than usual.
I started by exploring the Dom (cathedral) area, taking pictures of the structure and details. Inside there was a mass underway, and I used the quiet shutter settings on my 5D to take a few shots. As I left, I noticed a woman, apparently an imigrant, begging outside the front gates.
There’s a train bridge that crosses the Rhein not far away that, like the famous bridge in Paris, is adorned with locks that have been placed by visiting lovers. Many were engraved, and those dated back to the 1990s. I looked at them for a while, and decided that my favorite was a giant brass turtle lock.
Along both sides of the Rheine is a long footpath, and near the Dom, a small park. As I passed through, a man was making bubbles for the children, who were chasing them around wildly… jumping and screaming.
I continued to walk the city for most of the day, but didn’t find anything that was as promising as the area of the bridge and cathedral, so I returned in the evening just before sunset. It’s a popular spot to watch the sunset, and the city has thoughtfully build numerous tiers of steps along the eastern bank for people to sit and enjoy a warm evening on the river.
More interesting than the colors that were beginning to appear in the sky, though, were the rock climbers who had set up belay ropes on the bridge foundation walls and were climbing in the fading light. This, I decided, was a great way to add a bit of interest to an otherwise cliche view of the city, and as luck would have it, the climber who fit into my frame was a beautiful blond woman (photo at top of page).
As the colors of the sunset grew stronger, I snapped a few more photos of the bridge and Dom, and then packed up my gear to head back to my hotel. In the morning, I’d set out for Prague.
