River Cruise, Cologne & Currywurst

The least survivable seat.

I've been introducing my eldest to Sesame Street (sadly, he doesn't like it because of Cookie Monster), so in the spirit of ambitious attempts, today is brought to you by the letter C → cathedral, cruise, and currywurst.
 
The top deck of a Rhine River cruise was where the views were, so naturally there was nowhere to sit.
 
What I hadn't accounted for was the wind. The way it funnels down the valley and straight along the river meant that the best spot on the boat also felt like the least survivable.
 
Everyone up there was getting battered. Hair blown sideways, hoods up, and barely an audible word over the roar. But there they were, enduring it anyway because the view apparently justified the beating.
 
I hung back in the wings waiting for a chair to come free, half-convinced they were all in on something I was missing.

Burg Pfalzgrafenstein, near Kaub

Beneath all of it was the water (obviously…), however, I have a complicated relationship with it.
 
As a child I once saw treetops poking up from the depths of a murky lake, and it spooked me more than seems rational now.
 
Ever since, if my feet can't touch the bottom, some part of my childhood pulls up a chair in my head and refuses to leave. So there I was, on the Rhine and not entirely there either.
 
We disembarked at St. Goar, which the tour had decided was far enough before the couple of hours on to Cologne. Twenty minutes was all we had.
 
Ordinarily I'd have ditched the coach at the first opportunity and found my own way, but stranding yourself in the middle of the Rhine Valley with no German translator is a bolder move than I had in me.
 
So I looked at the castle on the hill, got back on the bus, and admired the river from a slightly more comfortable seat.

Docked up at St. Goar

Then came Cologne, and the cathedral everyone goes for.
 
What caught my eye just in front of it was a currywurst stand at Breslauer Platz. More specifically, it was the essence of a national dish being served out of a cardboard box delivered from the back of a three-wheeled van.
 
It didn't look much out of place parked up in the shadow of the centuries-old spires.
 
That currywurst stand had the soul of a culture packed down and boxed up until it was small enough to eat on a lunch break. All in front of another national treasure that was curated for maximum exposure.
 
There was something faintly absurd about the scene.
 
Cultural intangibles are surely lost along the way. And yet, this accessibility is how most of us ever experience any of it at all.

Breslauer Platz, Cologne

What I didn't know then, standing there not eating it, was that the whole thing is younger than my own parents. Currywurst, that is.. not the cathedral (in case you thought I was having a dig). 
 
There's a debate about whether currywurst first began in Hamburg, but the prevailing theory is that it was improvised at a Berlin street stall in 1949. Ketchup and curry powder were combined by Herta Heuwer, who had bargained the ingredients out of British soldiers.
 
My mom left Germany in the fifties and didn't try it until she went back in 2006, by which point currywurst had become the thing everyone eats (800 million currywurst a year).
 
She's since worked out how to make it properly at home, and I'm pretty sure Herta would approve.
 
→ How to make real currywurst at home
 
I didn't eat it that day, and so I couldn't quite judge it either. Which is roughly how I feel about most things that make a big thing small enough to consume in one go.
 
Including, I suppose, a letter like this one.
 
P.S. I never did get a chair on the top deck, but would still recommend.