Through The Streets Of Cologne

As I mentioned in the previous post, I headed towards Cologne (Köln) with most of the fellow workshop participants. Much of the traffic signs as well as other things along the way were kindly explained by Siegfried – which made a 50 km journey quite interesting :)

Towards Cologne…

Cathedral – each of these towers is about 150m (about 500 ft) tall and tower on the left is few centimeters taller than the right…

After having discussed with a friend of mine, I was to take the guided tour of brewing (beer brewing) houses in Cologne (other option was to tour the Cathedral). The best part of the tour, as described by a fellow tour-taker, was the guide herself. She did a good job of taking us through the less traveled streets of Cologne, explaining many interesting and some not so well known facts from Cologne’s history. With the flood of questions from the audience never seemed to stop, I am more than sure – as were few other tour takers, that she would never want to be a guide to a bunch of scientists/geeks ever again!

Best part of the guided tour of breweries… the tour guide!

Part of the audience… intently listening to the the guide’s narration

A colorful street of Cologne

When it was the time to say sayonara to our beloved tour guide, she had left us right in front of a quite popular brewing house. Interiors had a very nice ambience and reminded me of restaurants in the Western Ghats of India – one of the differences being a container used to serve water (in Western Ghats) is used to serve the locally brewed Kölsch! I was pleasantly surprised to find (very tasty) vegetarian food (thanks to Tatjana and Walter for the recommendation) although it was the Kölsch (and photography) that kept me more occupied all through the evening :D

Brewery

Interiors

Kölsch galore…

My dinner – Kartoffeltaschen – an assortment of vegetables along with stuffed (crisply fried) potatoes

While I was busy with my third Kölsch that Walter explained some mathematically not so obvious tricks of the trade – used by the brewing houses/bars in Cologne (I bet it’s true elsewhere as well). A 100 litre barrel of beer often fills about 130-150 one litre jugs (a.k.a. pitchers) while each one litre jug (pitcher) fills about six 200 ml glasses. It’s so much about the appearance of the glass (or the pitcher) being full rather than it’s actually being full!

One of my Kölsch servings

Shooting along side another (needless to say, a very proud) Nikonian made things a lot easier – especially when it came to fixing shooting parameters and such. It would be an understatement to say that everybody (at least the workshop participants) had quite a bit of fun.

Sandeepan Mohanty – a fellow Nikonian

Some proof that people had fun and lots of it…

Like every other good thing, I didn’t keep track of how many servings of Kölsch I had. But the fact that I walked a non random walk back to the bus (near Cologne Train Station – few hundred steps away) from the brewing houses while seemlessly discussing archives of Ph.D Comics with fellow participants clearly indicated that I didn’t drink as many as I should have! Anyways, return journey to Jülich had quite less people on the bus (no, we didn’t loose them – they headed off to their homes from Cologne).

Saturday Sun is already warming up Jülich air and /me, sitting in a breakfast club with fellow Houghtonites, is wondering what direction to head today & rest of the weekend – may be the Citadel and the lesser known streets of Jülich…

PS #0: These and other pictures from the trip to Cologne can be found here.

PS #1: If you were on this trip and would like to have any of the above pictures (or the ones in the gallery), please send me an email or leave a comment here. I will mail them to you as soon as I can.