A Visit to Cologne Part 1: In which the author idiotically bounces through his brother's bathroom leaving a trail of destruction behind him.

Arriving in any new city I enter a state of delirious fascination coupled with unending stupidity.

It's a state of mind I actually inherited from my mother, who once right after crossing the Canadian border, said in a drunken and dreamy voice "I don't feel like I'm in a different country," and then later shouted out "Oh look! They have Subway here too!"

My reign of idiotic American terror hit at Chris' apartment when, upon the invitation, I said I would very much enjoy taking a shower after what amounted to 24 hours of transit.

In the bathroom I looked up rotated myself a few times, taking in the odd wall-mounted water heater in the shower (about the size of a large dictionary or coffee table book), the various aquatic decorations (they came with the apartment) and then began to search for a way to turn on the light.

"Oh how fascinating!" I would say to myself in my head. "It's a cord pull to turn on the light."

This was followed by tugging the cord several times to turn the light on and off, as if this was some great revelation of technology the German's discovered. Who knew that one could turn lights on and off with things other than switches?

I close the door, rotate again, this time looking for the toilet, remembering that perhaps there was a reason Chris showed us a second bathroom.

In the next room (or WC if we want to do as the Germans do) I search for the light, this time prepared for the pull cord. I see no immediate switch or cord, but then notice a plastic fish dangling before me, suspended in the air by a silver ribbon. Aha!

I pull it, hear a ripping sound, and gasp. This cord, it appears, is merely for decoration, and I should probably not tug on it.

But it was also in this bathroom that I would face my week-long nemesis. The toilet. It is, to describe it in the single word Chris used, "confrontational."

I would include a picture here to back my findings, but the thought of snapping a photo of it made my spine shudder, so I'll have to rely on the extent of my mastery over the written word.

The bowl itself is like any found in any home here in the U.S. Instead of a little knob or lever to flush, there's a large square button. But within the bowl lies my bane.

Instead of a smooth cone leading down to the exit point for your, *ahem*, deposits, there's a clear out-box on the opposite end you'd expect, nearest you. But the water does not fill up halfway like we do here stateside.

In the center, there's a small tray-shape molded into the bowl, allowing your, *ahem*, deposits to sit in a small, extremely shallow puddle of water, mostly exposed to the elements before being washed into the aforementioned outbox upon flushing.

My words may not fully describe what this is like, but the result is being faced eye-to-eye with your No. 2s before they're washed away. I mean eye-to-eye. They're straight up there, standing and staring at you, not under water, but just sitting there, as the smell slowly fills the room.

The flushing process is not a casual affair, but done in desperate fear of the unsightly terror you've cast upon this earth. It's as though the designers wanted to say to you "Look, foul beast, upon your excrement, and fear it!"

But fortunately, bowel movements being what they are, we were only forced to endure this unpleasantness a few times throughout the week. But, as exhibited here, future toilets were equally confrontational, such as this one found at a castle in St. Goar. That's a guillotine by the way.

Other domestic rituals were much more pleasant, and actually quite tasty. It's a rare site to see your typical bowl of sugary cereal drenched in milk. Chris and Kelly have taken to a local breakfast of chopped fruit, yogurt and granola all in a bowl. This cuisine was so appealing to my palate that we went straight to Costco the day after we got back to get some flax granola, yogurt and plums.

I found this, I should say, much tastier than the array of sliced cold meats we found at a buffet breakfast at our hostel, each one looking like another strange variation on bologna.

More stories of adventure and intrigue to come in the following days. I promise this is the only one involving bowel movements.