Sprechen sie Englisch?

It was the German phrase of the weekend, as I spent the last three days in Cologne. That's pretty much all the German I know. It came in pretty handy.

Cologne is just two and a half hours by train, so I left on Friday morning (despite the illness I could feel taking over in my throat) and was there before noon. I checked in at the hostel and headed out, sore throat and all.

I didn't have much of a plan for Cologne. I hadn't even pored over a map, as I had in preparation for London. I glanced at a map, a crappy one at that, and I knew I needed to hit up the two major art museums and the Schokoladenmuseum (at last, a German word for which I needed no translation).

I went to the chocolate museum first, of course, because you wouldn't want to miss something like that, and enjoyed it despite aching body and spinning head. I wandered around a little bit more, locating various places I wanted to visit in the event that I felt better the next day. By 4:00 I was laid out on my bed, where I tossed and turned for a good 16 hours. Not much of that was actual decent sleep, and I'm fairly certain my five roommates thought I was a fruitloop. I did get up at one point to shower.

I left the hostel at 9:00 on Saturday, delighted that I didn't have to agonize over every step, but still suffering with an increased difficulty in swallowing.

Museum Ludwig is modern and contemporary art. Picasso, Monet, and Pollock again kept me interested. The giant blue canvas reminded me of why I prefer da Vinci, Rubens, and Rembrandt. (In its defense, it was a nice shade of blue. Sort of cerulean.) Especially interesting here was the special exhibition, The World's Most Photographed: dozens of pictures of fascinating figures such as Adolph Hitler, Greta Garbo, JFK, Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Pablo Picasso, Marlene Dietrich, and others. The only downside was that all the captions were in German.

The Wallraf-Richartz Museum wasn't as enjoyable. You can only look at so many paintings of the Crucifiction. There were some works by Rubens here, which I impressed myself by recognizing before I was close enough to see his name anywhere. Downstairs there were some pieces by Warhol, which I didn't think I'd like that much. But I did.

Other than that, I

a) did some shopping.
b) considered cutting my hair and chickened out. I have NEVER chickened out of cutting my hair. This is an issue that needs to be addressed.
c) noticed that the most popular scarf in the world is taking over. You know the one. If you don't own it, you've seen it. It's tan, with fringe, and black and red stripes. It's everywhere. EVERYWHERE. I saw dozens, just this weekend.