Alaaf! This year’s WEBMU (Whiny Expat Blogger Meet-Up) took place in Cologne. Our hosts Resident Evil on Earth, Cheap as Chips, and Futile Diatribes did an excellent job of putting together a fun-filled agenda for all of us. » Read the full post
We just returned from a weekend of cavorting with other expat bloggers in Cologne. More about WEBMU is coming up in a future post; right now I want to show you a ridiculous number of photos from our rooftop tour of the cathedral, one of the highlights of the weekend.
Cologne’s cathedral (Dom in German) is the city’s big recognizable landmark. It is Gothic and old, and definitely worth exploring from as many angles as possible.
The tour started with a walk along a narrow balcony that snaked its way around the interior of the church from about half-way up. » Read the full post
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While I admit that nearly 8 months in Munich has possibly skewed my perception a bit on such things… doesn’t 2 dl (less than 7 oz) seem a little too small to be considered a ‘beer’? (Note the fork I placed in the photo to the left, so you can appreciate just how ridiculously diminutive the beer is.)
Right, so I spent a few hours in Cologne last week. I haven’t been outside of Bavaria (yet inside Germany) very many times in the past few months, so I was on the lookout for regional differences. The one that kept striking me over and over: the itty bitty beers everyone was drinking. I mean, I am the first to admit that a Maβ* of beer is excessive, but Munich’s standard restaurant-sized beer, half a liter, seems to be about right.
In Cologne, these delicate little beer thimbles are transported in their own little carriers by the waiter. Each kranz (‘wreath’) carries 11 itty-bitty beers. If you were to pour all 11 of them all into proper beer-drinking vessels, you would have just over two Munich-sized beers. Clearly the Oktoberfest tents will not be importing waiters from Cologne.
The one benefit of such teeny-tiny beers, I suppose, is that there isn’t a chance for the beer to get even a little bit warm before you are done with it. And I am a firm believer that pale-urine-colored beers should be drunk as cold as possible (if they are going to be consumed at all). Not that Kölsch is all that bad, as far as pale-urine-colored beers go. It’s just that, well, it’s nice to have a choice of other-colored beers, too, you know? When you walk into a Munich brewery (or basically any Munich establishment that serves beverages), you generally have four beer choices: a helles, a dunkeles, a weiβbier, and a dunkeles weiβbier. It’s not an NYC beer bar, but it will do.
Not so at Früh**, Cologne’s premiere brewery-restaurant. Kölsch was basically it. Two deciliters of it. To look on the bright side yet again, at least my waiter was right there with a fresh beer every time I finished mine (which occurred every two minutes or so). And when the waiter has to come around so often, that makes the service somewhat better than it is in a typical Munich joint.
* A Maβ of beer is one liter, and is the standard size available in a Munich beer garden. In many cases, nothing smaller is available (unless you are drinking weiβbier).
** Incidentally, ‘früh’ means ‘early’ in German, leading me briefly to the hypothesis that 2 dl of beer was meant to be a breakfast portion. That might make sense…
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