Euro Tour Day #2 Continued... Colonge

We took a train from Brussels to Cologne, the journey was pretty uneventful, Christie had given us some snacks so we kept ourselves going with them. We had 6 hours to kill in Colonge so the first thing was to dump the bags.

We didn't have a tour guide set up for Cologne, which was a bit of a shame. We managed to work out how to use the locker, which was better than the Japanese ones! We managed to dump all the bags in there but only for 2 hours. Luckily, the Cathedral is right next door to the station so we went for a gander, unfortunately the weather was pretty grim so we didn't pay to go up the tower. The cathedral itself is beautiful, typical gothic style, stunning stain glazed windows.

We went back to the station to see if we could find a tourist information place to get a map but we failed on that account. We had a poke around in a few of the shops, Ebi-kun got himself a logic game then we had a quick look around the cathedral area to try and scout out somewhere to have dinner. 

Then we needed to go and pick up the bags, I wasn't sure what would happen if we over-stayed our ticket. We had spotted a beer hall, Ebi-kun really wanted to try wurst and that was on the menu, I really wanted to try beer!! Ebi-kun would have been happy here but they didn't have beer!

The meal was ENORMOUS, we decided to share. The "side" dish which was more than enough as a main, were 3 potato fritters with apple sauce and black bread. It is apparently a local dish and was delicious, well except the bread, neither of use was fussed on that. The main meal was a giant brokwurst with onion gravy, potatoes and sauerkraut - can't get much more typical German than that. I of course had a beer, a very tiny beer! The food was great and the beer hall lived up to its reputation except there were no hot men in lederhosen!

"What is this tiny beer?"

The potato fritters and apple sauce - Reibekuchen (really good!)

Brokwurst, potatoes and sauerkraut, this dish was massive, tasted great but we couldn't finish it!

We ate the meal slowly, mainly because it was massive and partly because we needed to kill time. It was still raining hard and we didn't fancy treking around in the rain with our bags. We ended up killing time in Starbuck then finally getting on the sleeper train to Vienna.

The carriage was two double bunk beds, the bottom were taken with an older German speaking couple, well we thought they were a couple but it turned out they weren't! We pretty much got into bed and went to sleep! I kept waking up though because I was worried Ebi-kun would fall out of the bed, it wasn't very wide and the lip on the side was only a couple of inches high.

Not the best night sleep but it got us the Vienna in one piece!