Keeping up with Beth

Our trip had a rocky start in the planning stages, but we made it, as everything always seems to in life, so we began in cologne, Germany on the 2nd July. Traveling up to London on the train, to St Pancras (got it right mum) over to Brussels, then cologne. It was a fairly easy journey, which was useful considering you have to keep track of your own luggage on trains rather than checking it in on planes.

We arrived around 9:30 to our hostel and checked in easily and found our room. We weren’t particularly tired, so we decided it would be good to go out for a walk around and see what was near by for a bit and find some food, and naturally we found ourselves in a mcdonalds.

The next day was our one day in cologne, since we had to chop the first day of our trip off! We managed to keep quite relaxed and just find a couple of things to do and wonder round the city the rest of the time. We visited the Wallraf Art museum, which was super interesting with art from the Middle Ages, the baroque period and the 19th century. The change in art, and technique and just generally the culture and time was super interesting. The Middle Ages art was something completely different to what you expect in a normal art museum because in those times, the concept of ‘art’ wasn’t the same as it is now. It wasn’t about expressing yourself or creating something unique. It was all off stuff they knew and in those times, that was religion. It seemed as though the art was their form of story telling, they used the stories they knew as true and created incredible pieces based around their beliefs telling the story of Jesus. Sometimes in our culture its super easy to get caught up in the stereotypes and not remember the core of things, it was refreshing to see the Christian faith being showcased for what it is- the bible stories, ultimately the Jesus story, rather than all the rules that are stereotyped and seen on facebook all the time. It was a reminder of the real reason for being a Christian and what it is to believe in Jesus. It gave perspective to see that their religion was such a core part of their culture and their identities. They believed it so strongly, they followed the rules to enter in a chance of being saved. Walking around the rest of the museum on each floor you could see the art progressing forward and moving away from their faith and into a more worldly view. It was a really interesting shift, and explains how we have a world that seems so worried about ourselves and having any faith is harder than having no faith maybe in the worlds eye. They see things so practically. The baroque period still featured some religious depictions but it moved away from that a little more and began on portraits of important people at the time, and family members and more historic. Moving into the 19th century basically saw the end of peoples faith being displayed in art and the beginning of expressionist art which was incredible seeing landscapes of cologne in Impressionism. It was gorgeous and began to feel more creative, as people perhaps began thinking for themselves and expressing themselves more freely through art.

I really liked the art museum.

After that we walked by the river, ate lunch watching the city pass by and just enjoyed to quiet scenery of the German city. Locks Bridge was about a 10 minute walk away, so we walked half way across seeing the city from a different angle and seeing all the locks there are on the bridge! It was a sweet walk, walking over the river that runs through the city and admiring the atmosphere of cologne.

We walked past the cathedral too, which is a mighty building, so intricate and massive! It’s beautiful. Cathedrals have some kind of magic about them, especially European ones, standing so strong and intricately designed to be worshipped in. St stepping out the train and seeing that straight away was breathtaking.

In the evening, it seemed only bucket list material to have a beer in Germany, so we did, we got some dinner at a bar and had a molsch beer to drink. It was quite relaxing sitting in the evening, still warm enough to sit outside, watching cologne happen as it does around us and still bright enough to feel like it was 6pm!