Day 9: Cologne, Germany

June 12, 2013

Today was our last day in Cologne and it was a good one to end on. We started this morning by taking the subway across town to the zoo. Clayton and I agreed that it is the best zoo we have ever been to. They had a huge collection from around the world and the enclosures were not as secure as the ones in America so you were often so close that you could reach out and touch the animals (but we didn't). What made the zoo visit perfect was probably the weather because it was a perfectly warm, calm day which meant that all the animals were moving. We got to see many animals that we hadn't seen before. We saw the penguins and the sea lions during feeding time. The sea lions were trained and did many tricks which I had never seen before. The snow leopard was up and walking around when we went by and Clayton really liked that.

Sea Lions doing tricks

The sea lion show/feeding was Amanda's favorite part!

Clayton's favorite part was seeing the Snow Leopard so close

The first time either of us have seen an anteater

Notice the baby baboon on the left

Meercat keeping watch

Look at how close people can get to the animals! Much different than American zoos.

 After the zoo, we rode a small cable car across the Rhine River giving us great views of the city and the river.  

View of the city from the cablecar

In the cablecar high above the Rhine and the highway

Clayton said seeing another cable car freaked him out because he realized
what we looked like dangling in a small thing high above the ground.

We took the subway back into the main part of town and had supper near the old town again. Clayton had salami and ham pizza and I had lasagna. Then we sat in the park by the river and waited to board our boat for the night cruise. While we sat by the river we mostly looked at the people riding bikes. Bikes are really popular in this town, there are bike lanes everywhere and it seems that there are more people that ride bikes than drive cars. In America, you do not typically see 65-year-old men, women in dresses or men in suits riding bikes, but here they all do. On the pedestrian walk by the lake the bikes zoom in and out of the people. There are many bike shops here and we saw bikes in the windows for 1000-3000 Euros (the price of a used car). Anyway, we eventually loaded our boat which rode up and down the Rhine. We sat on top in the open air part until it got too cool. It was a very nice boat ride to end out time in Cologne.

View from the river. We were on a boat like the one in the picture.

Oddly shaped office buildings

On the boat!

Tomorrow we leave bright and early at 7:25am to head in the direction of Amsterdam. We plan to stop in Utrecht on the way and arrive in Amsterdam tomorrow night. We say farewell to Deutschland!