Thursday, January 24, 2013

COLOGNE, GERMANY, PART 4: Addendum

Before I leave Cologne, I found just a few more pictures that I have to include. Cologne really is a wonderful city--so much personality and so many things to see, such as this rather odd statue on the left and the beautiful bike parking on the right (no ugly metal bike rakes for these Germans):
  
. . . or what we think was a wedding:
. . . or these wonderfully cartoonish characters perched on the side of an old church:


Our guide introduced us to the statues of Tünnes and Schäl, two rather comic German gentlemen engaged in friendly discourse with each other.  Legend has it that if you rub their noses, whatever you wish for will be granted. Naturally, we were all compelled to rub the  noses (which were already pretty shiny from the caresses of thousands of tourists).
 

Along with the humorous art, there is also plenty of serious art in Cologne:


I especially like these somewhat primitive but moving depictions of the crucifixion that we discovered in one of the churches we stumbled across:



Cologne, city of contrasts, was a good place to end our tour of Germany.

Next up: The Netherlands




3 comments:

  1. I really like the terra cotta like statues. Cologne was not high on my list of German cities, I think partly because it was so devastated by the war that it lost some of its oldness.

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  2. Think of all the germs we acquired from those noses. Eeww.

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  3. (Sometimes your comments are pretty funny. . . like the one above.)

    I like the photo showing the old sculpture on the facade of the cathedral with the new. And those carved angels look positively rapturous.

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