Cologne (Koln) Germany Oct 8

I was so tired from yesterday's museum visit that I slept until 10:30 am this morning (could have slept even longer).  We had a nice lunch onboard (the food has been amazing so far...such things as mussels with white wine sauce) and disembarked our ship for the city of Cologne.  We toured the famous cathedral

 St Christopher statue:

The cathedral was built from the 12th to the 19th centuries, with various delays due to funding and wars.  The stained glass above (there are over 90,000 sq ft of stained glass in the cathedral) was a fairly recent installation, and yes it is not so much out of focus as it is pixelated like a computer screen (and in fact it was designed using a computer).  Cologne was 90% destroyed during WWII,  thankfully they were able to store most of the stained glass in a safe place in advance, and the cathedral itself was lucky enough to not be destroyed during the Allied bombing.  The premier artpiece (slightly out of focus) was a gold-leafed sarcophagus supposedly containing the bones of the Three Magi (wrapped in Chinese silk determined to be from around 100AD, so who knows?)

The stained glass was amazing, some dating back to the 1200s.  All of it told a story of some sort, and it's good that we had a guide who explained various panels to us. Example:  the last window below tells the story of the Bible starting with Adam and Eve, which was useful because most of the parishioners were illiterate.

Our guide then took us over to the Roman-German Museum next door.  By 50 AD Cologne was the largest Roman settlement north of the Alps with a population of 45,000

There have been 3 major Roman artifact finds in Cologne: one in the early 1900s, another while rebuilding the city after WWII, and most recently during the construction of the subway, when over 2 millions additional artifacts were found.  Here is a Roman tile mural (seen from about 30 feet up...it was about 25'x40') with 1" tiles from around 220AD in its original location.  It was discovered in 1941 during the construction of an air-raid shelter, and the museum was built around it.

They have the world's largest collection of glass produced during the Roman era...here is some glass nearly 2000 years old

  This entire Roman sculpture was found in some local guy's back yard

We then walked around Cologne's shopping district, had some local beer (Kolsch, very fruity and tasty)

Observed the local food scene

and returned to the ship with our buddy Jean

Tonight, we continue cruising down the Rhine River