What do you mean, southwest?

So, to clarify, Adrienne was hesitant about waking me because on her first attempt, around 6PM, I responded with incoherent rambling about London and the tube (and California, I distinctly remember California being important.)

I have a distinct memory of awaking, and of having a conversation with her, but I also know that I was incoherent, and what´s more, I could tell I was incoherent at the time. I was so out of it that I was aware I was out of it. Odd, no? Anyway, I blame the lack of sleep on my part, since she´d slept on the bus, and I´d had no such respite the day before.

As an aside, for the rest of our time in Germany, we apologize for any z-y crossover. The keyboards here are QWERTZ (instead of QWERTY--for those of you who aren´t familiar with these terms, look down at the top left five characters on your keyboard), so the constant switching of y and z makes for difficult typing, especially after you have the whole keyboard layout memorized.

´Anzwaz´, final story of the night is about our wanderings around Köln tonight. After she finally work me up around 8PM -- by turning on the light and saying my name, like a civilized human being--we went out and meandered around Köln for a while. We started at the gorgeous Cathedral of Köln, and wandered into the shopping district, all pretty walking areas, no cars. Unfortunately by 8PM the district was already shutting down, but we still window shopped and saw a few street performers (including a skilled accordion and violin duet) on the streets as we wandered. After we left the shopping district, we attempted to wander north-ish to our hostel.

Several dozen blocks (maybe a mile and a half or two miles) later, we stepped onto a main street and sought out a map near a bus stop (one of those tricks that are handy to remember: when lost, look for bus stops, there are usually maps nearby). We found ourselves in the southwest corner of the downtown area, the complete opposite direction from the way we´d intended to go.

So that was a bit surprising. Appearantly my sense of direction was addled as much as my language ability had been two hours earlier. So we got turned around, headed back towards the hostel (only disapointment of the evening--we never found an open grocery store, which was our only real objective, aside from seeing the city).

On the way back to the hostel, we saw a golden winged Ford Fiesta. So, that was odd.

The weather this evening was fantastic and a lot of the architecture and areas we walked through were really cool, so the evening was still a lot of fun, despite our failed objective.

We´re back at the hostel now, about to plan our train trip for tomorrow and figure out where we´re headed next, then clean up and crash for the night.

We´ve been taking crash courses in German from restaurant menus. If things get especially quiet one day expect us to give you a German-to-English food translation lookup table from what we remember at our various stops.