Cologne

This appears to be the only pic of me in a suit for the enitire trip. Weird, considering I spend most of my life in them. This is in the basement of the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, a 300 000 circulation daily paper in Cologne. Why is there a large bear with a boombox in his teeth in the basement?

This is one of the more interesting pictures here because it isn't.
This is the Cologne cathedral which I found to be quite beautiful, but was not able to get far enough away to capture the entire 750 year old structure in one picture. So, what we have here are two pictures which I subsequently Photoshopped together.

The inside of the cathedral is also quite awesome. (No, that's not a word I normally use, but in this case, it's appropriate. Totally tubular...)

This woman has put in place this chalk painting of Rembrandt van Rijn on the plaza in front of the cathedral during the course of the day. There are other artists to the left and right of her and you can make out part of the neighbouring picture in the top left corner. During the course of the night, the fiendishly-efficient Teutons will drift onto the scene with their road-cleaning rigs and wash these away. I think that's a stunning concept -- transient beauty, butterflies and dragonflies gone in the blink of an eye. I thought about this later on in the trip when I met my first redwood...