We had to get up at 3am on Monday to catch a taxi to the airport, and our plane landed at 7:30am. Since it was Monday, we wandered around a bit looking at the old buildings and fortunately, the most famous building in Cologne, the cathedral locals call the Dom, was open. We climbed the 509 steps up the tower to get a view of the city and to see the bells in the tower. When we came down, our legs were trembly, so we found a cheap place in the nearby train station to sit down and have some lunch.
After lunch we were able to check in to our hotel. We were on the third floor, which meant we were really on the fourth floor. If you didn’t know, Europeans number their floors weird. They call the first floor the zero floor and so what we would call the second floor is their first floor and so on. There was no elevator, but luckily they had already taken our luggage up from when we dropped it off earlier. We relaxed in the room for a bit, using the free wi-fi, before we headed out for the Kölner Synagogue. (Köln is the way Germans spell Cologne.)
When we re-entered the building, we were taken on a private tour of the facility by this great little old rabbi who did speak English. He also asked if we were Jewish but wasn’t bothered that I wasn’t. It did mean he spoke more to me than Ilana when he was explaining things, although I knew most of it already. I knew the curtain separated out the most holy place, and when he led us to a room that housed a few artifacts like a museum, I knew what the shofar was and what the phylacteries were (though I always forget they call them teffilin). My favorite part was when this little old man told us we could hear a shofar being played on YouTube. The synagogue was one of the oldest in Europe before it was destroyed in WWII. It was rebuilt in the 1950’s. Before the war, the synagogue’s community numbered 11,000. Now it’s only 5,000. He told us about 80% of their congregation speaks Russian because a large number of Russians moved there in the 1990’s. Ilana and I found this fascinating and discussed it afterward, wondering if it was because of the fall of communism. I looked it up online and sure enough, Jews were afforded some protection in the Soviet Union, but when the U.S.S.R. collapsed, there was a rise in anti-Semitic sentiments in Russia.
We finished our evening with dinner at a Chinese buffet. It was not the best Chinese buffet I’ve ever visited, but it sure was nice to have Chinese food of any quality. That night at the hotel, I enjoyed my first bath in nearly two years.
I don’t mean that I hadn’t bathed in the sense of washing myself with water, I mean actually sitting in a tub and relaxing. There were jasmine bath salts provided in our room so I got the bathroom really steamy and soaked for a bit.
When we arrived at the airport check in, we discovered our flight had been delayed by two hours. But the airport gave us 15€ vouchers to use on food. We were able to buy dinner at McDonald’s and snacks to take with us back to Tstan. The delay also meant we arrived in Tstan late enough in the morning to take a bus back to the PCO instead of having to hire a taxi.