“The Cologne City Hall, located quite close to the Cathedral, is one of those charming harlequin buildings made of pieces from all times and morsels of all styles that one meets in these old municipalities that are themselves, with their laws, mores and customs, constructed in the same way.” This Read More …
This is a major art museum near the Cologne Cathedral. Officially it has a more complicated name, the “Wallraf-Richartz Museum & Fondation Corboud”, but when they moved in to their modern new building in 2001 they decided they needed a shorter and snappier name, so for marketing purposes it is Read More …
When the French author Victor Hugo arrived in Cologne in 1840, the first thing he went looking for was the cathedral. He was, after all, the author of a gigantic best-selling novel about the cathedral in Paris, which in the eight years since its publication had made him famous and Read More …
When the French author Victor Hugo arrived in Cologne in 1840, he did not immediately go looking for the Rhine, as I had been expecting. Since his book was called Le Rhin (The Rhine), and Cologne was the first place he visited that was actually on the Rhine, I was Read More …
The city of Bonn is on the Rhine River at kilometer 655, which is the approximate distance from Lake Constance (Bodensee), where the numbering begins. Between Lake Constance and Bonn, the Rhine has been joined by numerous tributaries such as the Aare, the Neckar, the Main and the Mosel (to Read More …
The Marksburg is one of the many castles on the hills overlooking the Rhine River. I took this photo from the train window on my way to Koblenz. Of course I could claim that this photo was the result of my consummate skills as a photographer, but actually it came Read More …
For many years, the Drosselbart in Frankfurt-Eschersheim was a great place to eat, drink and socialize on warm summer evenings. They had a large garden, so you could usually still find a table even if the weather was fine and everybody was out. Together with family and friends, I think Read More …
>> Frankfurt Skyline Countdown # 12 << The Silver Tower used to be the headquarters of the Dresdner Bank, which was gobbled up by some other bank during a recent financial crisis. The building’s main tenant is now the Deutsche Bahn or DB, Germany’s labyrinthine state-owned railway corporation, Read More …
My office in 2001 was on the fifth floor of a six-story building in the unfashionable Gallus quarter of Frankfurt. At around three in the afternoon (German time) on a Tuesday my colleague from the next office came in and told me she had just received a strange phone call Read More …
>> Frankfurt Skyline Countdown # 11 << The OpernTurm, so called because it is across the street from the Old Opera, was opened in 2010. With an architectural height of 169.98 meters (according to Emporis), it is currently the eleventh tallest building in Frankfurt am Main, because it Read More …