What a night
Had a wonderful evening yesterday with my gf. We went out to one party a friends around 1800 which included a BBQ. A lot of nice talks with people I never met before and it was very interesting because those were mostly married couples. We are getting older. :)
The the entire party decided to go see the Koelner Lichter (http://www.koelner-lichter.de/) and most went by tram (city-train) and we thought we’d take the car because we needed to go somewhere else afterwards. After 30 minutes we figured this was a bad mistake. We wanted to meet the others at the Rhein (the river through cologne) but just didn’t get there. The city was packed. Suddenly they called that they were able to get on the roof of the WDR building so as our last chance we figured we would go there too. Once we arrived they told us that we could not come up anymore. Grrr… We had been driving around the city for 1hour and 20 minutes. We should normally have taken 20 minutes or something including the parking space :)
But as we had a parking spot we, all 5 of us who went with cars, decided to run toward the Rhein. The cool thing was that we were closer than we thought and actually arrived in time for the fireworks to start. Amazing. There was a big boat, which normally carries coal or something, in the middle of the Rhein and the fire works went of from there. 30 minutes. In sync with loud music coming from speakers all over the place. We were right in front of the boat and around the side of the river and on two bridges there were, as the police told at the end, close to 250.000 people. All watching the river and the firworks.
Fireworks coupled with music are simply amazing. It just too cool to see these things go off in sync with the music when a rocket takes 3 seconds to launch. These people knew what they were doing. The boat was turning into a thick cloud from all the launches that were happening. Sometimes they just seemed to launch a big collection of rockets which is when you saw a cloud about 2 meters in diameter and 4 meters high shoot up on the boat.
The even launched fireworks into the Rhein which then exploded on the surface of the water. WECO Feuerwerk, who seem to be kind of like world champions of fireworks (http://www.weco-feuerwerk.de/ , can’t get to the site at the momnet) did the show at the end and they really pulled it of very well.
Next, around 12:15 we went on to the next party at another friends place which was again very nice but totally different from the first party. I really don’t want to be their neighboors. We were singing and playing guitar at 2 am with open windows and everything. :)
Very nice all in all.