Cologne part 2

August 21, 2005
*Writing aboard the train back to Frankfurt Sunday night:
*Friday night there was a party for the journalists. It was a blast – great food and drink. The local beer specialty in Cologne is called Koelsch, served in a small glass, about 0.2 liters. They’re dangerous because you hardly feel like you’re drinking anything, so you just keep going.

*Saturday was my one day here completely ‘off the clock’ for stories, so I slept in. Sabra and I took a dip in the hotel pool. Then another Burns fellow, Josh from ABC, met up with us. Curt briefly joined us at a little café by the river. From there, we took our opportunity to go inside the Dom (cathedral) – all of the Catholic ‘pilgrims’ were heading out of town for an overnight vigil, so the city center had emptied out quite a bit. From the cathedral, we walked to a beer garden famous with the locals (I think it was called Paeffgen). They brew the Koelsch there, and it’s a pleasant place. Then we ended up in a restaurant in a high tower at the Messe (convention center) overlooking the city center as the sun set and the city lit up.

*It was early to rise at 5:30 a.m. Sunday. Sabra and I made our way on press buses to Marienfeld to cover the big final mass with the Pope. Getting to the field was no problem, but once there we had big problems trying to find the press center – nobody in any of the ‘official’ uniforms knew where it was or the answers to any other questions we asked. We made our way around the hill where the Pope would be speaking and finally found the center after much frustration and got our computers working. And then I had to wend my way through the crowd to find the Charlotte group. At one point I had a panic attack, no joke, because the crowd more or less ground to a halt blocking a walkway and I was stuck in the middle of it, mashed up against everyone, and felt like I couldn’t move or breathe. I finally had to shove my way sideways out of the knot, take a few deep breaths, and then start moving again. Found the Charlotte group with surprisingly little difficulty after that. Watched Benedict’s service on the screens with them. The sheer scale of the event was impressive, with ultimately over a million people there (half of them had slept overnight on the cold, wet ground). The Pope wasn’t even a speck on the hill from where we were.

*Then came the nightmare effort to leave - no amount of logistics can handle that many people trying to leave at once, and unfortunately things were poorly organized. I ran into Matt from AP and one of his co-workers by chance. We then spent another hour to 90 minutes trying to make our way to where some mythical ‘press buses’ were supposed to give us a ride. No luck, so we decided to walk a ways because a local on a bicycle told us it was about 5 km to the nearest city center, Frechen, and we thought it would be an easy walk. Turned out to be not so easy.

*One part of the walk was neat: As we started entering the edges of Frechen, the locals were looking out their windows to watch the stream of pilgrims from all over the world walking by, and many of them were waving at us. I’m sure it’s one of the bigger things to happen to their little town. And some of them had set up little snack bars and other businesses in their driveways to serve the pilgrims walking by. We stopped at a guy grilling bratwursts and had some.

*But the walk soon turned painful. It was more like 10 km, and we were all carrying computer gear, and all of the streams of pilgrims who’d left the field on foot converged with us until we were a mob moving down the streets of the town. Just as we were beginning to despair of finding transportation, we lucked into hailing a cab and I enjoyed a sleepy ride back to Cologne courtesy of the AP. In all, getting to my hotel had taken five hours.