Railtrip Frankfurt - Mainz - Bonn - Köln

We (5 man team) made 3 day - 2 night -trip to mentioned cities during holiday week after the end of German pre-course and before the beginning of lectures.

The companions ready to hit the rail

Start was at 10 a.m. after waiting for one oversleeper for one hour and first target was Frankfurt. Nevertheless quite good timing since it took something over 2 hours there and check in to hostel is available earliest at 1 p.m. so we got to drop our back bags right away.

How: whole Germany train ticket for 5 persons in any day costs 68€. It covers buses, trams, REgional trains and InterREgional trains, but doesn't allow for utilization of faster CE or ICE trains, sadly. Those 2 types of trains are highly expensive and probably only CEO's and Ministers travel with them...

Hostel booking in advance for one night in Frankfurt in Five Elements (central location, in red lanter district, cheap happyhour coctails and spacious common room) and one night in Köln in The Black Sheep (20-30 min walk from old center, nice location, nice colorful rooms, nice showering facilities, quite small common room (kitchen)). Both were about 20€/person/night half a week in advance and highly recommendable. Sheets included, bring your own towel. We could have wanted to stay in Köln for other night to see some more, but the whole city was full booked. 

Frankfurt am Main, a.k.a. Mainhattan. City of money. Fairly small city with 600 000 inhabitants, expensive streets and skyscrapers (tallest being 259m high Commerzbank Tower). Mainz tower is only one accessible for public and provides really worthy view at 200 meters (~4€ for students). 

View from Mainz tower

There would have been couple of interesting museums, most notably Naturmuseum Senckenberg, but we were too late to visit that. Frankfurt Stock Exchange is also one central point of interest to see. Oldest parts of the city lie in Römerberg, not visited this time. Frankfurt was the first city I've been with skyscrapers and mainly therefore an interesting experience. 

We ate our stomachs full, and more, in a Chinese buffet with Sushi for a little less than 10€. 

After strolling a while in the city, a beer would have tasted good, but it provided to be challenging task to find a pub. We visited one promising looking one, but inside an old guy came talking to me that "yes, you may stay, but we are over 60 year old men here discussing about impotence". I didn't too much look around, but friends noted that some of them were also kissing each other. So we bumped into a veteran gay impotence discussion club. We didn't stay there to find out whether or not we would have been solution to their problem. 

Walking a little more, we saw a beer advertisement sunshade and went in to a cozy looking bar. There was interior space made of glass walls and bar counter in there, and out of that in the hallway of that building were some sofas and tables. Ok, fairly priced beer, we chose to stay for one. I wen't to toiled and saw there some gay concert advertisement poster. At least we had a good laugh and got to drink the beer to drive away biggest thirst. 

9 p.m. or so we went back to the hostel and stood in the common room drinking and playing some pool and slept well after long day.

Opera

The next morning we headed to Mainz with intention to visit 1-2 places on the way to Köln and to arrive there at evening. Mainz really is a beautiful city with nice atmosphere and it's landmark is rather huge cathedral with big fascinatingly-detail-rich sculptures inside.

Cathedral of Mainz

After seeing that and strolling a little bit more, it was time to take train to Bonn. Bonn is the old capital of Germany and therefore culturally rich. It's also well known for being the home city of Beethoven. Hour was already quite late, around 6 p.m. so it wasn't possible to visit any potential museums or anything. Neither we had proper plans or map about locations of interest. There happened to be markets taking place and 1 kilo of grapes for 1 euro. Great bargain for sweetest grapes I've tasted but that was pretty much all the city had to offer for now. 

Typical style of center of Bonn

Some minor Roman ruins

The train trip down the riverside of Rhein was worthwhile. Between Mainz and Köln, we could see approximately 50 castles, some more and some less impressive, and also the landscape is something as such. Would be nice experience to have a boat cruise on Rhein. 

One of those castles, don't remember where

We finally arrived in Köln at 9 a.m. perhaps and wen't to eat 6e hamburger/steak meals into a close by place called Barbossa or something. Köln is the proud city of Kölsch, local beer served in ridiculous 2dl glasses, to make people angry, I'd guess. Taste wasn't anything special. After that, it was time to go rest for the exploration of the city being in turn the next day, especially after finding that we would stay only 1 night in the city due to the full reservation books in hostels. 

The big day in Köln: walking to center took about 30 min from the hostel and we had received a nice map from there with all the points of interests to see. There are lot's of churches but after seeing the one in Mainz, and when expecting for Kölner Dom, these were not much. Striking feature of Köln were those ugly concrete cubicles everywhere (Köln was pretty well levered down in WW2)! Oh a church, oh a monstrous building from soviet union, oh another church...

Definition of massive

Köln is hometown of candy firm Haribo, has a nazi archive which we actually visited and which would have been quite interesting with good German skills (no English text anywhere, ofc), chocolate museum, a Roman museum with some outrageous 6e entrance fee, didn't go there, hey it's not Rome anyway and then the Dom. We paid the couple of euros to climb the tower up to sight stand at height of some 100m. It was a nice experience even though the views are not very good because the place is so thickly covered with a cage to prevent suicide activities probably. The Dom is simply massive. It was impossible to make a decent picture of it because it just won't fit in one meaningful photo. Also it has astonishing amount of detail in it's construct, but hard to say if it's very beautiful or not. Worth experiencing definitely. One day was well enough to see the main points of the city, and to see too many concrete cubicles but they also say that both Köln and Frankfurt have very lively nightlife. Don't know about that then since to me it seems to be the (mostly boring) same basically everywhere. That area remained unstudied. 

The city of Beton

Six hour or so train back to Karlsruhe was rather ass numbing experience.