Cochem

Sorry I’m slowing down on these, I’m running a bit out of steam on them (and I still have three more to do T_T ) (why did I take so many pictures) (help)

Day 11

Trier was one of my favourite places on this trip! There’s so much to see there, but it’s all so close together. The train trip here was nice though I was sleepy. It doesn’t stick to the riverbank as easily as it did lower down on the river, I guess the river was too wiggly here for that to be cost-effective so there were a lot more bridges and long tunnels than the previous trip from Koblenz to Cochem. When we arrived it was still like 11am, too early to go to our hotel, so we decided to put our luggage in a train station locker and go to a museum first. But we needed change for the locker, so we went to the bakery in the train station and bought some buns to get the coins necessary. This accomplished, we walked to the Rheinisches Landesmuseum Trier, passing through an 18th century garden on the way. We stopped by the ornamental pond to eat lunch, and watched the ducks and pigeons faffing about. Continue reading →

Aachen

Day 8, cont.

Despite our first train being late, it was fine: our second train in Cologne was late too. We only had a few minutes in Cologne, though, not enough time to visit the Cathedral again (which I had previously visited in 2012), but enough time that I could walk to the end of the platform and get some new pictures. Though we got off the first train precipitously enough that Tharash forgot his waterbottle. : ( But he resolved not to worry about it (probably seeing how upset I get whenever I lose things : P). Continue reading →

Bruges

Aachen was really high on my list of places to visit for this trip, because I’ve seen the Cathedral there in several documentaries (my favourite being The Day the Universe Changed, Episode 2: In the Light of the Above, which discusses the impact of rediscovering Greek and Latin scientific and philosophical writings on Western European thought). Also, we used this video to help us plan the trip. So here we go! Shorter post this time because we were only here less than 24 hours.

Day 7, cont.

We got on the IC (inter-city) train to Brussels where we changed to the high-speed ICE (inter-city express) train. It was a very high speed train because however fast I guessed it was going from looking out the window, it was probably going about 50% faster than that. (A high-speed train later in the trip was going about 240k/h, which it said on the screen that announced the upcoming stops, so it was really booking it. North America could never.) There was a really cute black baby on the high speed train, but he was a wiggly little boy and when the mom walked away for a few seconds to attend to some luggage I had to keep him from squirming out of his seat and running after her! Eventually she got him to sleep. Continue reading →