travel log day 2 - cologne, germany

18 Aug, 2025

at the moment i write this it has been 48 hours since we left home to drive to the airport, and i have slept for maybe three of them.

i don't think this is going to be a very good or coherent post.

sixteen hours ago or so we landed in frankfurt, germany, in an airport that was refreshingly airport-like in nature; solid, kind of dirty, but functional and not trying to pretend to be anything else. we got breakfast (burger king¹ vegetable based nuggets, because i was curious about them) and something to drink (mcdonalds "sakura shot" sprite, which i had to order and understand why it existed so far away from japan) and sat down for a while waiting for a train.

this was a far more pleasant experience than this time last year, where we had no idea what was going on and spent 20 minutes trying to operate a train ticket machine in german. for anyone considering this journey, i would definitely recommend booking train tickets online and leaving yourself plenty of room for flight delays.

the train took us to cologne, dropping us directly at the Koelnmesse exhibition centre (though two days early for gamescom, so no points there) and a single stop on another train from our accomodation; where, as it turned out, we were five hours early for checkin and thus arrived before the place was actually ready. so we went out again, though we at least got to leave our luggage there.

and so we roamed for a bit. went to aldi, roamed a bit more, sat down somewhere for lunch (but mostly for air conditioning). in our brief period with apartment wifi i tried to set up a local esim for my phone, the first time i had tried such a process - and thus spent most of the walking around period distracted, trying to walk and navigate but also set up, and subsequently troubleshoot, my data connection - without internet access, on account of the aforementioned esim-not-working.

this process sucked, and it took me about an hour to determine that my esim, once installed, needed to be activated, and that doing so would require my passport (back in my bag in the apartment that we were too early for). if i was alone i think i probably would have been overwhelmed; as it was, i got Very Irritable instead.

with a couple more hours to kill, we decided to head somewhere - i picked a metro station that i vaguely recognised the name of and that we could get to easily, and we went on a train ride again. cologne has a light rail network that is split between above-ground shared roads and underground tunnels, and i love it very much² - it's quick, it's useful, but most of all it's a web of actually decent public transport infrastructure that they've committed to to a degree that i don't see most places manage. melbourne is probably the closest anywhere i am personally familiar with, but (while i do adore the melbourne tram system) it just doesn't quite have the pizzazz of a tram leaving a stop in the middle of a road and then just vanishing into the ground.

at the other end, we sat by a water fountain for a while, got some ice cream, decided we didn't quite have it in us to attend the australian gamedev dinner meetup, then went back to our apartment instead. existed for a while, made dinner, tried not to fall asleep before 10pm lest we invite jetlag, had mixed results.

at some point i realised i didn't feel tired, but i was clearly losing my ability to think straight or perform tasks. it's a weird feeling, knowing you are falling apart from a critical lack of something you don't feel like you need. my teammate correctly observed that this was at least partially still an adrenaline response; i had indeed just been thinking about how i wanted to go our for a half hour walk.

we got off our flight sixteen hours ago, but somehow the rest of this day has still been one of existing in stasis while waiting for our journey to actually be over. tomorrow will make a better Day One, i think. i hope.

earlier i had so many thoughts about the things we talked about at various points sitting down and waiting today. as it is, i have finally started feeling the tiredness get to me, and it's getting worse with every sentence i write, so those thoughts might have to wait until another day.

by the time i actually post this, many of the people i love will be soon to wake up³. i guess this has been a series of two all-nighters, as far as my body is concerned. it feels Wrong to be going to sleep right as others start waking up. i wish i could gather enough of a sentence together to try to express why.

goodnight friends. see you in Several Hours.

#gamescom2025