The last Parisian croissants….
Our time in Paris had sadly come to an end, but it was off to Cologne and German Christmas Markets. We never feel like we have enough time in Paris but more adventures awaited!
Anto and I were of course awake early despite not needing to be out of the apartment particularly early and having stayed up late packing. Anto went our to get breakfast pastries, and grab some single pass train tickets as our week passes had ended on Sunday as the French being French have specific days for their weekly tickets.
We finished with a delicious patisserie breakfast. There are so many good boulangeries that you have to try different ones each day and today there were many sweet treats, which turned out to be lucky as it was a long day of traveling and time between meals.
Full of sugar we did the last bit of cleaning up and tried to get the bags stuff shut even though we’d taken coats, boots and food bags out. We didn’t think we’d bought that much yet but the bags didn’t agree!
Farewell Paris
It was another drizzly day in Paris as we left our apartment, just after 9am. The worst bit of traveling is always negotiating all the stairs and trains with suitcases but we made it through to Gare du Nord and were on our Eurostar to Cologne with time to spare for our departure just before 10am.
After a busy few days we were glad to have a slower travel day. It turned out to be even slower than anticipated as a freight train collision a couple weeks ago between a Netherlands and German trains had caused track damage. We’d been notified our train would be slower due to the track issues but it was even slower than anticipated as the last part of the trip took us over suburban lines and level crossing at a very slow pace. The first part however was rather zoomy, we were cruising at 300km/h and we left France and past through Belgium and the Netherlands on our way to Cologne.
Everyone was rather tired after a hectic first week of the trip so Anto rested and kids fillled in time writing in their journals and playing games on their phones and tablets. Astrid played games on her phone, Zinnia refused to rest and did lots of games and colouring in and Soren planned his future 20th birthday trip during our 4.5 hour trip.
Our first stop was Brussels, then Liege and we were into Aachen in Germany where we had a long stop with cops coming searching for someone and changing direction.
The last part of the trip we slowed right down due to the track issues. The original 3 hour journey had pushed out to 4 and ended up being over 4.5 hours so we got in at about 2.30pm.
We had our cooler bag of stinky French cheese with us on the train which had polluted the whole carriage, but most people on the train were French so probably didn’t care….
Finding the Queenslanders in Chilly Koln HBF
We did eventually arrive in Cologne just after 2.30pm and once off the train found our way downstairs with all the bags and found my Dad (Gramps) and Kim, who’d arrived from Frankfurt an hour earlier (having just flown in from Queensland).
Köln HBF was not very warm but we were keeping ourselves warm lugging all the luggage over to our apartments, which aren’t too far from the train station or the cathedral.
We went to find our accommodation at Haus am Dom which is on the other side of the train station to the cathedral, approximately 300m walk, which was a blessing with all the bags.
With German efficiency we had been informed we’d receive the codes for our apartments at 3pm. We arrived a few minutes early but did not get the codes until one second before 3pm. After our tiny Paris apartment with 7 people we had plenty of space spread over 2 large apartments here. Our upstairs apartment was enormous, especially compared to our tiny Paris one. Soren was staying in the downstairs apartment with Kim and Alan, meaning there was one less child to fight with the other 2, at least part of the time!
Market time
After a quick unpack and we got our warm clothes on since it was a whole 6 degrees, and head out to find our Christmas market. Colgone has many Christmas markets and we intended to explore them all over our few days here but we thought we’d start with the closest one, conveniently located at the cathedral and only a few hundred metres from our apartment.
If anyone has ever been to Cologne, the Kölner Dom (Cologne Cathedral) is just enormous, and it’s literally right next to the train station and you cannot miss it. It is rather impressively tall. It is hard to appreciate the scale of the catherdral. It rises straight up right next to the train station (Hauptbahnhof) and you can see it as you roll into the station and from pretty much anywhere in Cologne.
I did plan to go up the Kolner Dom to take photos but it wasn’t going to be tonight as food and gluhwein were on the agenda.
It was around 4pm and none of us had really had lunch. Those Parisian pastries seemed a very long time ago! We were also busting to get into our first German Christmas market…..
The cathederal market is right at the foot of the cathedral and we were all hungry and tired so were straight into exploring with the aim of getting some tasty treats. We decided on Käsespätzle, bratwurst and glühweins to warm up.
The lights were beautiful as the market was set under a big canopy of lights making a giant Christmas tree. This market had a particularly good selection of craft and food stalls. We had to restrain ourselves from buying anything until we’d checked out more markets as our bags will explode!
Astrid was excellent at harvesting taste tests of everything and got a great feed going from stall to stall getting samples and then letting us know which ones we needed to go back to for purchasing. It was tempting to buy a bit of everything but we decided we’d also be broke pretty quickly!
As darkness descended the market got quickly busy and we were all tired and it was rather cold. The temperature had dropped to around 4 degrees but the wind was making it feel even colder. The kids were now feeling the cold and even the pretty lights and kinderpunsch wasn’t keeping them excited and warm.
It was now around 6pm and the rest of us hadn’t been as good at harvesting free food at the markets as Astrid so we wandered back into the heated train station to one of the supermarkets to pick up some supplies before heading back to our apartment.
Our post Christmas market dinner consisted of German breads and pretzels and left over stinky cheese from France (the one that had made our whole train carriage smell) and French wine, that we’d had stashed in our suitcase so it didn’t break. Of course there had to be a game of Uno too!
Up next….
A big day of exploring more of Cologne and checking out the ‘gnome’ and ‘angel’ markets. We then ventured to the nearby town of Bruhl for a wonderful lunch, a palace and another Christmas market!
