Beyond blue sky

I was pulled like a magnet to enter this place just as it was closing. The guard looked at me and smiled telling me to be quick. I didn’t know what to expect, in fact, I didn’t expect anything since Cologne was not even on our itinerary. We planned a road trip around Western Europe.My first ever long trip “alone” without parents (yes, we chanted ‘freedom!’ ‘Alcohol!’) We had been traveling for about a week now when we stopped saying yes to everything out of politeness and started proposing what we really wanted to do.
We stopped in Cologne because we miscalculated the distance between magical Bruges and fun Berlin, a rookie mistake but I am so glad. The previous night in our hostel in Bruges we met interesting people from around the world (some of them I still talk to) and spent the night indulging in 6x1 beer deals. We even partied through a fire alarm. At the time we were having so much fun we did not think about what was happening but at check out time the nice hostel workers told us how funny we seemed to them for that. Looking back at photos, I still can’t understand how we misinterpreted a bunch of people walking out of the bar in their pajamas (the bar was connected to the hostel).
I couldn’t blame my travel mates from wanting to sleep the whole day in Cologne. I tried, but I just couldn’t. How could I be one day and one night in a new city and sleep? The travel bug in me urged me to walk out alone onto the dark and empty streets of Cologne directly into the most breathtaking Cathedral I’ve ever encountered, and I am from Barcelona.
The ceilings were so high they still haunt me today and the full moon let in the perfect amount of light for me to be struck by the magic of its stained glass windows. The guard walked up to me and gave me some historical facts about the Cathedral and Köln itself. I was dying to live more adventures like this. This encounter filled me up with so much energy that all I could think about new excuses to get lost again and again and let the magic of travel lead me. Suddenly, I was transported to medieval times, to Mordor and I even heard classical music.
I have a PhD but no amount of studying can compare to the lessons I learn when I pack a back and begin to walk. Who would have told me that I would have been so interested in a history lesson about German Catholicism and Gothic architecture. At that moment I realized that one could discover alone, that traveling is not a holiday, it’s an art and I haven’t stopped since.