Blogs don't burn

A few of us went to Cologne (or Köln, as it’s called auf Deutsch) for the day yesterday. It was supposed to be for the day plus the night, but there were no available hostels and we decided in the evening that staying up till 3 and getting back at 6 wasn’t as feasible as it had seemed that morning. Cologne/Köln for the day.

It’s strange, in its way, this German day-tripping. You go some place for however many hours and you form whatever opinion of it—in my case, that Cologne was very pretty, and that I certainly liked in more than I did Frankfurt, but that I wasn’t blown away by it, and a day was fine—and you think you know it. I’ve been to Cologne, I’ll say. But have I? Can you go to a place for nine hours and say that you’ve been there? Can you do that and think of it as a place in which people live and work and breathe, and to which people move, and fall in and out of love, and have their places, and grow old?

I don’t know if you can anywhere. Even in Cologne. Or Köln.