Since Saturday had been at least six hours of driving on top of the nine from Friday, sleeping in seemed advisable. However, the cushions I borrowed from Marianne did little to mitigate the concrete floor of Jaimey’s apartment. Unfortunately, Jaimey’s bed being little better, he got up early to type up a short novel. Good sleep was clearly not going to be the cornerstone of my stay in Düsseldorf.
Jaimey had made some tentative plans to go to Amsterdam with a colleague of a friend or a friend of a colleague or somebody named Mahmoud anyway. A long drive seemed a bad idea and suddenly two small children were now part of the program, which would, of course, limit our activities in Amsterdam (because kids have shorter tolerance for museums and such). Thus the first order of the day was to disentangle ourselves from that plan.
Jaiey’s brilliant alternative was to head to the train station in Köln (Cologne). Although I confess it was a harebrained scheme, I do maintain Jaimey is smarter than he looks. His rationale was that he had still failed to get anything for Jacqueline and Germany, being terribly German, was closed on Sundays. However, through some odd transportation subclause loophole, train station stores were still open. As sweetener, Jaimey threw in the idea of seeing The Dark Knight – which I had seen before in the US but I was happy to see again. Honestly, I mainly went along because I had not been to Köln for maybe about 8 years when I had been there before with, you guessed it, Jaimey and his girlfriend at the time. I had also a special fondness for the city, having visited several times as a kid – maybe to see the cathedral.
Köln, as you can see from my dramatic pictures, is a pretty city. Of course, any large German city is significantly nicer than any large American city save perhaps San Francisco and New York. Maybe it has something to do with use of public space, pedestrian and preserved old downtowns, and urban planning to minimize sprawl and strip malls?
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