The Craziness of the Cologne Market

Saturday myself and Penny were off to the Christmas market in Cologne, Germany.   We’d been looking forward to going for weeks on end so we were both totally stoked.   I think we weren’t really prepared for what was waiting for us though.

We knew it was going to be busy, since it is getting closer to Christmas and we went on a Saturday but christ on a crutch – it was insane!!

The above photo was taken just after we got there at 11am and that was when it wasn’t even busy yet, by comparison anyway.  At this time we were still able to weave our way through the crowd.   By the end of the afternoon there was easily 2-3 times as many people and we didn’t move through the crowd, we stepped into it and beyond that it was completely out of our control.

I hate crowds with such a passion, but amazingly I didn’t lose my mind.  I think my excitement of being there outweighed my irritation.  I just wish I had been able to see more as it took so long to go through the one market by the cathedral that before we knew it our time was up and we had to head back to the busses!

There was a lot of hand painted ornaments, wood carvings and other Christmas decoratings, but also a surprising amount of non-Christmas things that made me go ‘uhhh’ like the dude making the belts or the entire stand for nothing but boomerangs.  Seriously… boomerangs?

And the food…

Oh my god, the food!

For every stand with ‘stuff’ there were three with food.  Whether it was chocolates, crepes, bratworst, potato pancakes or pasta… there was food everywhere you looked.   It wasn’t cheap either!  That doesn’t stop anyone from getting it though, because everyone else is and you don’t want to miss out!

The most impressive thing of the whole trip was the Cathedral.

I’m so glad it’s there year round because I really want to go visit sometime when it’s not completely insane and see more of it, and the rest of the city.

There were so many other little things to tell about that day, like how we got ripped off 3 hours of the trip when the bus actually left at 5pm and not 8pm like we were told when we booked it, or how the bus driver had the temperature in the bus at just a level above the temperature of hell, making us both feel incredibly carsick… but who really cares about those things?  We were at a Christmas Market in GERMANY, and I don’t think either of us ever thought we’d be saying that before we moved here.