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May. 18th, 2023 09:19 pm
Germany, Saturday
The next day we check out of the hostel. The hostel is pretty communal: all the guests have to strip their beds and put their laundry in bins before leaving, and the night before we’d had to bus our dishes and clean the table after dinner. We’re so high up that we have to take an aerial tramway over the Rhine into Koblenz. J. says that one of the cars on the tramway has a glass bottom so you can see the river, and on our way back that’s the car we get. (The trip seems full of these little miracles, the rain holding off while we tour the castle, for example.) We press on toward Köln, and now J. and Doug visit their favorite tourist site, a music store called, imaginatively, The Music Store. B. has told me she usually brings a book, so we read while they pound on drums.
Another couple, a woman from Greece and a man from Belgium who met through the Discord server, has come to Köln, and we check into the hotel and then go out to dinner at a restaurant that specializes in schnitzel. And here we’re introduced to another custom: at this restaurant, if you don’t want another beer, you put your coaster over the glass. Otherwise they just keep on bringing the beer, one after the other. It’s Kolsch, of course, which is brewed in Köln. Then we go back to the hotel and stay up late talking.
Another couple, a woman from Greece and a man from Belgium who met through the Discord server, has come to Köln, and we check into the hotel and then go out to dinner at a restaurant that specializes in schnitzel. And here we’re introduced to another custom: at this restaurant, if you don’t want another beer, you put your coaster over the glass. Otherwise they just keep on bringing the beer, one after the other. It’s Kolsch, of course, which is brewed in Köln. Then we go back to the hotel and stay up late talking.
