Carnival: Part 2

Friday we had an early train trip out of Riva…6:45. So when I went to bed around 4, my 6:00 alarm was not pleasant. Surprisingly, our whole group made it to the train station on time! There were 8 of us that went on the trip, 5 girls and 3 boys. We had a connection train in Lugano (about 15 min away) and then got on our train to Basel, Switzerland. That leg of the trip took about 4 hours and I may have slept 2 hours…and that is probably an overestimation. We switched in Basel and headed towards Cologne, another 4 hour trip…quite a LONG TRIP if you can tell. But, the early morning paid off when we got into Cologne around 3:30 and had time to look around before heading to our hostel.

The first thing you see when you get out of the train is The Dom, a HUGE cathedral in the center of Cologne. It is one of the UNESCO World Heritage sites and is one of the best known architectural sites in all of Germany. I don’t think the pictures do it justice, the inside is awesome, the windows are floor to ceiling stained glass and I love the gothic/medieval feel it has. After checking that out, we grabbed an early dinner at a little Kebob store, which are all over the place there then went to the hostel to shower and get ready. Our reservations were such that there were 4 in one room, 2 in another and 1 all alone (yea, that’s only 7 rooms…one guy slept on the floor since we booked the last 7 rooms that hostel had for Friday). My friend Lindsay and I were in a 4 person room but with two other girls they put with us. It could have been weird but they were not even there when we arrived and I only saw them for a few minutes Sat morning. We showered and put on our matching leggings and colorful tops (what our costumes consisted of) and met everyone at our hostel’s happy hour. We hung out there and left to go check out Cologne around 9pm.

Just walking through the city was so neat. The costumes were great and the coolest thing was that everyone was dressed up, no matter the age. We were headed to a bar that we were told would have a huge party that night and stopped along the way to warm up – it was snowing all weekend – and grab drinks. The band playing at the bar was a Reggae band which was really fun. We didn’t stay there too long though because it seemed like something we could go to in the States. Our solution was to grab a cab and tell them to take us to a place that is a lot of fun…he did not disappoint.

We pulled up to a street that was blocked off and each side had clubs blaring techno and people everywhere. It was called The University since it was near the college, making it full of kids our age. It is what I would expect Bourbon Street to look like. Since there are no cover charges anywhere, we popped in and out of places whenever we felt like it. Our group got split up 4 and 4 as my group stayed at one bar longer than the others but we all made it back to the hostel (pretty late).

NOW, let me preface this story with what our original plans were. Only 4 of us wanted to stay in Cologne for both nights (Me, Lindsay, Corey and Mike) and the other 4 made plans to leave Sat and go to Heidelberg, Germany for Saturday some of Sunday. My group booked the hostel for only Friday night thinking that we would just sleep in on Saturday morning and put our stuff in lockers at the train station. Since clubs in Europe (especially during Carnival) stay open until at least 7 am, we planned to stay out all night and catch our 6:50 train on Sunday. This all went downhill when we found out the hard way that this hostel had a strict 9:30 check out policy. I woke up at 9:15 to a harsh looking maid yelling at me in German to get out of the room. We were literally kicked out. You should have seen us in the lobby, we were quite haggard. We decided to try our luck and see if there was ANY way we could book another night and luckily, they had a room of 4 we could have. The purchase of another night there was the best $25 spent all weekend. We went back to sleep until around 1 when we left to check out some more sites around Cologne and get ready for the night.

We showered and me and Lindsay put on our same costumes…yea, I felt/smelled terrible. We walked around the city for a bit getting the feel of things but a lot of things were closed for the festivities. I really wanted to go to a contemporary art museum there that supposedly has one of the best Picasso collections, but that too was closed. For dinner we found a HardRock Café, about as American as it gets and I had a hard time justifying going, but those chicken fingers were worth every penny! We met a group of American guys who were stationed in Germany and they had been there for a few days and knew where we should go. After dinner, our now expanded group went to a brewery, Fruh.

It was soooo cool! It was about 3 floors with tons of rooms and German music. There were also guys that would walk around with small glasses of the bar’s brewed beer (the only thing they served there). They were cheap and apparently is was ok to just smash the glasses when you were done. A bit dangerous but I took part :-) That stayed open only until midnight since it had been hopping all day long, so we headed back to the street we were at the night before. It was about 3 when we started thanking our lucky stars that we got a room for the night. Exhausted, we headed home for a short nap until our early morning train. Since we were so tiered, we slept most of the trip, making it go by really fast. We got back to Riva around 3pm and I immediately threw my clothes in the wash (since we decided Germany has a collective smell of cigarettes and meat) and took a shower. Not the most educational of trips, but I definitely got the feel of Carnival and had a great time! (This is not the end of the Carnival posts either; there are still 2 more nights of Belinzona we paid for!!)