Our bus returned to the castle to take us back down the hill,where we joined our guide for a walking tour of the old town. I saw no evidence of the bombing that took place during the second world war, but the condition of the buildings is too perfect for them to be several hundred years old.
Narrow streets, timber slats on walls and a minaret instead of a steeple
Nevertheless, Cochem is a photographer’s dream: stone cobbled streets, timber slatting on walls, (similar to that used in Tudor England),
narrow streets suitable only for walking or bike riding and roofs that are covered with grey tiles, which I assume are slate. Some of the roofs appear to undulate so that I wonder what sort of structure supports them.
1332 seems unlikely
Stone buildings that appear to be very old, butt up against the more common plastered variety, but 1332 above a normal looking doorway, had me questioning the likelihood of that being true, even allowing for a restoration date of 1960 on the other end of the doorway.
Like other European cities, Cochem has its ground ‘slab’ in the form of a grate,
Proudly Cochem – pity about the smokers.
unfortunately, now used for cigarette disposal.
England has its famous red letter boxes, but in Cochem we found these cheery boxes on walls, in blue and yellow.
Passageways for short people in the old town.
In old Cochem people could walk between streets via low and narrow passageways instead of having to go around the block of houses and shops. We saw this kind of thing in many European towns and cities – obviously for much shorter people than are common today.
Our ship was moored on the residential side of the river so we walked across the bridge from the business side and looked back to the castle towering over the city.
Reichsburg Castle towers over Cochem
The weather, on that first day of summer, was perfect for everyone except hay fever sufferers. Descending from the bridge, I found that the bank along the river, all the way to the AmaCello, was covered in metre high grass (the kind that wafts pollen about even without a breeze.) My eyes and nose were streaming as I ran back to the ship, where staff greeted me with a damp face cloth and several glasses of cold water. Obviously I wasn’t the only passenger suffering from the allergy.
We were due to sail soon after I boarded and I always enjoyed the ship’s lunch, so I stood under the shower for a good ten minutes to wash the pollen away and put all my clothes in the laundry bag before joining the rest of the passengers. For some inexplicable reason the injections and the medication I’d been taking for months, supposedly to desensitize me, didn’t work on European grasses, but that was the worst episode during our holiday.
A few days earlier I had suggested to Gunther, our tour organiser, that, as we would be sailing all afternoon after our Cochem visit, some of the guests might be interested in a presentation on my book, ‘The Green Velvet Dress,’ and in hearing a little about how I came to write it. To my delight, the planned ‘expose’ featured in the itinerary for that Monday and at five o’clock I entertained about a dozen fellow travellers in the special restaurant at the rear end of the ship. A few of them were too shy to read out their own creative piece (which I sprang on my audience) but we had several budding writers among us and they all bought copies of my book -most of which had to be posted when we returned home.