A Weekend of Lots of Things, but Mostly Crime

Weekend update!  We hit up both Köln and Düsseldorf, and discovered both cities kind of suck.  But we had fun anyway!  Here's your official rundown and all that jazz.

Saturday I got up bright and early to train it to Hannover, and then hitch a ride to Köln. My ride's name was Robert, my age, studies at the university I want to go to, and was ridiculously attractive.  I spent most of the three and a half hour ride flirting in German, and I got a hug for my efforts.  Success.

Then Marina arrived, with her coworker Chris in tow, whose talent for accents I found mind-blowingly brilliant.  Awesome, awesome, awesome sauce.  There were hugs all around, and then it was hostel time.

We knew we had to switch subway lines a few times, and subway tickets are so goddamned expensive, so we made the conscious decision to be Schwarzfahrer. Literally, "black riders," expect we were trying to find the hostel and not the One Ring. Schwarzfahrer are the people that take advantage of the fact that in Germany, you don't have to feed a ticket into a machine to get onto the subway platform. Schwarzfahrer do not pay for tickets.  And it's fine, because no one ever checks you. Technically there are random sweeps and what not, but I have Schwarzfahrered my way across almost every city in German and I have never been caught.

So, as Schwarzfahrer, we got ridiculously lost, wound up going in the wrong direction like twelve times, but eventually found the hostel.  Which was quite nice, although our roommates, though absent upon our arrival, had left a ton of UK newspapers all over the room, which lead to me swearing to sell my soul if they turned out to be Scottish.

At this point, we were all starving, so we decided to find a restaurant and eat food. When we sat down, Marina and I almost had heart attacks, because we realized we were surrounded by absolutely gorgeous men.  Everywhere.  Everyone in the restaurant was super hot.  Everyone in the restaurant was wearing V-necks.  Everyone in the restaurant was...gay.

Damn.  But it was still a good lunch.

We ran around a little more, and checked out the super-famous Kölner Dom, which, for the record, is staggeringly beautiful.  I'm not one to be impressed by big churches, but this big church was hella sexy.  Here, have some pictures:

Marina and I actually wound up going back to see it again the next day, but the only way we could get in was to say we were going to the church service.  And that's how, for the first time in my life, I voluntarily went to church.  But only until they started singing, and then we jetted.

One of the coolest things about the Dom was what happened at night: namely, that when they lit up the church, a massive flock of batbirds swooped out from the spires and flew around the cathedral like champs.  It was absolutely beautiful.  I say batbirds because what kind of animal it was is still up for debate.  Marina swears to high heaven they were bats, but I say they were only bats if science has decided to rename the pigeon.  They were too big to be bats, I swear!  Actually, they looked more like seagulls, except not even I, with my talent for explaining away the ridiculous, can come up with a plausible explanation for why a flock of seagulls would make camp in a cathedral.  

Eventually we did meet our hostel bunkmates, who were, disappointingly, not Scottish. They were plain old English, and made it pretty clear when they came in drunk at 5.30 in the morning, knocking things over, cursing loudly, and saying "I'm from England mate," just in case no one had already figured that out.

Sunday we decided we were tired of Köln, which is a) not attractive, b) boring, and c) filled with mean people.  So we bought a train ticket to Düsseldorf, with the sole goals being drink beer and find this building:

which we did, so we took fun pictures in the curvy metal sides.

Düsseldorf was really only noteworthy for two things: the train ride, and petty crime.

On the way there, the two Brits and I got into an intense debate on American geography, because I was arguing that american regions are written more by culture than geography.  Like, for example, how Florida is technically in the south, but it's not really considered a part of The South.  For reasons unknown to the world, Marina had a map of the US in her purse, so I broke it down: New England, East Coast, The (Deep) South, Florida, The Midwest, the West, the West Coast.  Like a champ.  And they did not believe me.  Which resulted in a riotous argument that half the train car was listening to, and laughing at.  

Düsseldorf is also where tag-team Chris and Marina, hereafter referred to as "Charina," decided to start stealing glasses from the restaurants we went to, while I pretended I had no idea what was going on.  They proved to be quite successful, and Charina has upped their beer glass collection by three.

Monday we bee-bopped around Köln some more while listing all the reasons we hated it.  We decided to catch a subway to the center of town for more bee-bopping and complaining until it was time to head out.  The stop before we got off, a couple people got on the train, including one obese and particularly bitchy lady right in front of us. Chris turned to Marina, nodded at a lady further down in the car and said "Hey...is that a ticket checker?"  Impossible.  No one ever checks tickets.  Then the lady right in front of us turned around and said "Tickets please."

Well, fuck.

I did the only thing I could think of, which was to pull out our train ticket to Düsseldorf from the day before and swear to all the gods that hate me that I'd never do anything bad again if we could just get out of this without being fined.  She looked the ticket over carefully and said, "This ticket was only valid yesterday.  I'm fining you each 40 Euros."

There are some occasions where it's useful to be a foreigner in Germany, and freaking out that the guy who sold you the ticket told you it was good for the whole weekend is one of them.  Namely because then you can play it off like your German isn't good enough to understand basic things like the days of the week.  We all vehemently swore up and down that our status as foreigners had been taken advantage of, we'd been duped, Germany hates us, etc etc, the result being that Bitch Ticket Lady flexed her mercy muscles and only fined one of us, instead of all three.  We split the cost of the fine, I did some quick math, and we discovered that, even though we'd been caught as Schwarzfahrer, we'd still saved money on transportation.  Fail/Win!

After that, none of us felt like illegally taking the subways anymore, so we walked back to the Dom.  Considering we were black riders, we appropriately found Gandalf there.

And then I hitched a ride back to Hannover with a vet student, and shared the car with her two guinea pigs.  And that's all we talked about.  For four hours.

The end!

P.S.  If you want more Köln from a distinctly British perspective, tell Marina I sent you: http://allthingsmarina.blogspot.com/2011/10/one-where-germany-loses-cool-points.html