Hanging out in the South of Cologne (and looking good ;-)

I am back in the town where I grew up.  I have a cold with a cough and my back is doing things it has never done before.  The sounds and smells of certain airily expulsions of my body are also foreign to me. Then add the bags under my eyes. Germany is making me sick!

Yesterday evening we went to Metro (the German version of Costco) and I bought a bicycle.  There used to be bicycle stores all over town, but they gave way to fancy restaurants, fancy jewelry stores, and fancy French bakeries. Signs of the Times that anyone living in Vancouver is familiar with ;-) Then you have to deal with bicycle rentals in hotels that look at you funny before they proclaim “For our Guests only”.  Go get stuffed, you German toad at Haus Berger!   Metro has a decent selection of low-end bicycles at decent prices and after about ½ hour of looking, shaking, attaching pedals to some models, cycling around the show-floor, all this ENTIRELY UNATTENDED by any Metro employees, I wheeled this baby to the cashiers.

  Not too bad for a price of Euro 219 + VAT.  As is required by law in Germany, this bike has a Dynamo Generator and some fancy front and rear lights wired into the hub generator.  Even if you have 219 LED lights from China attached to your handle bar and seat post and wherever else they could find room, it would be illegal to have the bicycle on the road if there is not dynamo generator mounted somewhere on it.  Dynamos in the age of LED lights. No Wifi in the internet age. No wonder Germany is making me sick!

One of the first trips on the new bike is to the hangout of my youth.^th birthday in this café. The original owner is still there: Peter, or Ringo, as he likes to be called.  I find out that he just bought his first E-Bike one month ago.  Germany trying to catch up to the second and first world, finally?  In this abandoned Wachsfabrik (candle factory) there has been a café ever since I can remember. At least it was already there when I was 15 years old. I celebrated my 18th birthday here.

While waiting for Ringo to open the Café in der Wachsfabrik, I fix some small things on the bike, read the on-board manual in the new camera. In this process I discover that it has some kind of HD panorama mode.  You be the judge:

A 360 panorama mode can also be selected.

Switching back to standard mode for a fewshots of the Café, in which I spent every available minute after school in my ‘formative years’.  Except for a few minor things, this room has not changed in 29 years ;-)

Since I always seem to wake up when the sun rises, and since I seem to be the only one suffering from that affliction/blessing, I usually have time to do some puttering or work on useless photographs.
That is how the following ones were created ;-):