Meet The Neighbors

If you take many inter-city trains around here, you can't help but notice the integration of land use. At one point on our ride to Liege, I glanced out the window and saw: a high rise apartment, a corn field, a golf course, a parking lot, a grain silo, a nuclear power plant. This was all at once, and without turning my head.

Sometimes you don't even have to board a train to observe this. Take Sunday, for example. Waiting at a crosswalk – the nearest crosswalk to our flat, as a matter of fact – Kelly and I saw just across the Rhein a cluster of somethings that hadn't been there before. We had a tram to catch, and there was no time for close scrutiny. That evening we were back at the crosswalk, and saw that these somethings moved, and that they were sheep.

It maybe isn't obvious in these pictures, but this is very much inside the city. You can see the Dom from here, and in fact could probably reach it by bicycle in fifteen minutes.
Anyway, they were cute. I took these pictures at the tail-end of our too-brief heat wave. I'd pedaled across the bridge to see them up close, and passed what turned out to be Köln's last hour of sunshine reading in a green patch at the water's edge, more or less pretending to live in a Rohmer film. And then of course the clouds rushed in. Heavy raindrops had almost completely rinsed the sweat from my shirt by the time I'd reached home.