Right now I'm in Germany, in our hostel. It's our second day here in Köln (Cologne) and it's still pretty surreal. Everywhere we go, all the signs are in German and people start talking to me in German and I don't understand a word of it. It's a bit scary until I realised that everyone pretty much knows English, so I just stare blankly at people who talk to me in German and they seem to get the message.

So, things have been very confusing for our first couple of days here. Confusing but fun. When we first arrived at the airport, we didn't know how to get into town due to a lack of pre-planning. As a result we jumped on the first bus we saw and ended up going nowhere. Luckily we managed to decipher a transport map and got onto a light rail train that took us into town, where we were able to find an underground to the hostel.

The place is very nice. I mean that - it's really comfortable and the owner is nice. He's on the couch over there playing Xbox or something with a fag in his mouth. When we arrived he sat down with us and showed us on a map all the good places to go and recommended Aachen to us for a day trip. We're going there tomorrow, which was absolutely unplanned. Also, we'll see if we can go to the Netherlands and Belgium if we have time.

Even though we were very tired we managed to go to the Dom (a huge, old cathedral in the middle of town) and climb to the top. There is also a Christmas market at the base where we sampled hot glühwein (mulled wine), currywurst (curried sausages) and reibekuchen (potato cakes). We continued on to another market which had a gnomes theme going on which was in the Aldstadt (old town).

We ended up getting dinner at some restaurant called Haxanhaus, which served up an unsurmountable amount of food. There was sauerkraut, some kind of sausage, a slice of a ham steak and the biggest pork knuckle in the world. I did quite well considering I was tired and had a cold coming on.

Today my cold has me in full grasp and is shaking the life out of me. Despite this we have struggled on and booked tickets for our trip tomorrow and walked around the shopping area for a bit. We also found the chocolate museum and the medieval market next door. I drank a bit much of the glühwein and mead and got a bit drunk, which didn't react too well with the cold.

Now we're going to rest up in preparation for our big trip tomorrow.