Looking out the windshield of the car taking us to the silk store

Rinku and Rahul in the silk store.

The elephant coming up the street.

A nice close picture of the elephant.

Oops, too close. We are boxed it till we pay for the pictures I took.

Waiting for Rohith and Shruthi at the Bangalore airport I went looking for the Lufthansa office that I'd seen a sign for. To get there I had to poss through this very empty, unused room on the second floor.

In the empty room, looking back the way I'd come.

On the way to the parking garage at the Cologne airport we walked through a hall so long that one could not see the end, at least in one direction. This was Saturday morning.

Tuesday, after recovering from my leg injury and the minor surgery in the German hospital, I was ready to walk a bit. Sharon and I went for a little sight seeing trip in Cologne.

Wednesday we went to a castle on the Rhine. On the way we saw George W. Bush as a bee hive. Faces of bad and/or scary people are sometimes put on the outside of bee hives in Germany. This one bee keeper thought old George was a good choice. A sign, in German, telling about the tradition can be seen here

Thursday, in a little town south of Cologne, we happened upon Beethoven's house when he was young, which is now a museum. We took the tour. It was interesting. Sometimes one can get an English recorded tour guide, sometimes there are English tours, and sometimes you have to rely on a friend who speaks German. I don't remember what the situation was here.

We walked along the Rhine and saw this face in a wall.

In Cologne, along the Rhine, they have a scale model of the solar system. It's spread over a few kilometers if you go all the way to Pluto. One can really get a feeling of how small the planets are compared to the solar system. The solar system is a lot of empty space with a few speck sized planets in distant orbits around the sun. The little raised, pea sized bump is Venus. Earth is a little bigger, but not much. The sun, some ways farther south, is a good sized ball, maybe a meter and a half across (almost 5 feet). I don't remember exactly how big the sun is or how far from the sun to Pluto, and should ask Sharon.

Friday we visited the Dom, the cathedral in Cologne, which was about all of Cologne that survived World War II. Allied pilots preserved it because it served them as a land mark, being so huge. I'm very glad they did. It is magnificent. Work was being done on this portion. Some portion is always being repaired.

Dom window viewed from inside.

A view out a small window in the bell tower, across the top of the cathedral and beyond. The Rhine River is in the background.

The plaza outside the cathedral often has interesting things to see, such as this chalk drawing that was in progress as we passed.

Sharon and her older daughter, Steffi.

Saturday Sharon and her husband, Rainer, took me to some nearby caverns. They had never been there, but they knew I like such things and so we went. They were very, very nice. Coming outside again Rainer noticed a large spot on my pants. The incession in my leg had opened a bit and a lot of fluid had come out and stained my pants below the knee. We went back to the parking lot and got a previously unused first aid kit from the car and I went to the restroom of the castle that was next to the caverns and patched myself up well enough to keep going without making my pants worse.

We walked around the castle and into the courtyard, but we couldn't go inside of the buildings, except the restaurant. As we walked back out of the gates a wedding party was arriving, and this cute little girl caught my eye. I like kids and she was cute as could be, as you can see.

We walked around the outside of the castle next, and the stone work, and the modifications over the centuries, were quite interesting to me. Rainer and Sharon are here on a road beside the castle.

I liked this big tree, growing outside the castle. We took a walk through the woods after this, and that was fun and very pretty. I took some stereo picture pairs that aren't shown here