Couchsurfing in Cologne: fresh mint tea and honey gummi bears

Apart from the cool couchsurfing stories, there's a direct connection between my experiences in Berlin and Cologne this time around - honey gummi bears.

I'll explain. In my post about Berlin I mentioned Bärenland, a rather cool shop on Schönhauser Allee devoted to all things gummi.

I had discovered honey gummi bears when I was in Germany doing the tourist-at-the-Weinachtsmarkt thing just before Christmas, and spending time with friends in various cities. I've got to admit that I'm not the biggest fan of normal gummi bears (although sour gummi fruits are pretty good). But honey gummi bears? These seriously rock my world. And apart from one packet from Munich, by the time I got to Berlin, it'd been 9 or 10 months since I'd had my last honey gummi bear hit. So when I found Bärenland I had to buy a couple of packets.

I hadn't finished the first when I got to Cologne, and I quickly discovered that S. was also a fan. It wasn't the only taste we shared.

But first, let me tell you how cool S. is even disregarding our common tastes.

S. plays guitar and sings and often goes busking. Or occasionally, she'll join one of her busking friends for a quick round of "In the jungle" (believe it or not, I joined in after taking this photo):



I had also been fairly indecisive about whether I would visit Cologne at all, and if so, exactly which one. First of all, S. was willing to accept me as a potential guest even though my profile was not as comprehensive as it could have been (eg I didn't have a photo). I did have quite a few references by that stage, so I guess that probably helped - it also helped that I had written TO S. rather than a general spam-type email AT her.

Once S. had established that she was willing for me to stay, she was also happy to put up with my flip-flopping as to which day I was arriving. And once we had the day sorted out, she was extremely patient with my one run-in with late trains. And then she even met me at the S-bahn stop.

Other shared tastes? The fantastic fresh mint (very spicy) from her garden, with which we made tea. Walking, especially randomly and especially at twilight - if you look very hard, you will see S. in this photo:



You can read a little more about our adventures on our melon tour in an earlier post. I'll just add that when in Cologne's CBD, I saw a shop selling Ben&Jerry's ice cream. I love Ben&Jerry's, particularly their cookie dough ice cream, so I bought a small carton of that. S. had never tried it before, and we discovered another shared taste.

So there wasn't anything extremely crazy; no stories I had to live up to about having spent three months in the Yucatan or anything like that. It was just a great day or so, hanging out with someone I really clicked with, someone I never would have met if it wasn't for couchsurfing.

When I was there, S. was talking about coming to Australia on a working holiday visa. I'm hoping she'll be in Melbourne when I am, so we can maybe take more melon tours, find a whole lot more shared tastes, perhaps find some more buskers to sing with, and generally have a lot of fun.