Today started at the regular time with me getting downstairs to eat breakfast maybe a few minutes early because the wireless was not working when I woke up. I found out at this point it only works when their computer in the lobby is turned on and they turn it off at night. Breakfast was moderately quick with no changes to menu. After checking over a few things and packing an overnight bag I was pretty much immediately on the road. It had rained all night and all through breakfast and in some respects I didn’t mind that I would take some time away from Bavaria as beautiful as it is there. I explained what I was doing to Sabine so she wasn’t concerned and asked if I should take my room key because I was not sure what time I would return home on Sunday. She said yes and I’ll just have to try to get back in time for dinner.
I suppose there isn’t a ton to describe about the epic drive across Germany. It was about 5 and a half hours with 2 pit stops including the one to get petrol on the autobahn. The Opel is not really the most screaming car in the world but I was up around 100mph a couple times. Over 160kph that is. Since the car has no pickup especially at high speeds the European driving tendencies could be a problem at times. Basically, they drive on the right lane of multilane highways (the autobahn) and in general move out to the left lane to pass. That I like a lot. But so many of them wait until a car that is moving up really fast to pass is just behind them to move out to the left lane and force them to brake and lose all momentum. It is like they are completely unaware of the rest of the cars on the road. I really didn’t see much scenery because I was concentrating on driving mostly. What I did see looked nice and at times repetitive. I had a tough time finding music on the radio and had to surf channels constantly. Often I was listening to songs I hadn’t heard since the 80s or so. Bleh.
When I arrived in Bonn I missed the house by the GPS but pulled into a lot not too far up the road. I found that Kate had texted me a few minutes before and I texted her back with where I was. She said she had just got home and was outside in front of her place so I pulled out and found her and we found a place to park. From there we quickly stopped into her place and she changed from her work clothes and we made some basic plans and then headed out to catch the bus to downtown Bonn. It is about a 10 minute ride away. Of course it was weekend schedule and the buses come less often. We also seemed to have the bus we were expecting disappear and had to wait for what should have been the second bus. Not really a big deal, but about a half an hour lost. It was ok though. We talked about what had been going on over the last few weeks.
When we got into downtown she started to show me the sites such as the part of the old medieval wall, the university buildings the scene down to the old palace like building which is apparently now a museum. I was a bit hungry but she ate at work so she brought me to the place with her favorite pizza and I had a half a small pizza. Then we continued on walking. I am sure my order of memory is poor because we saw a lot of things like the town hall buildings (old and new). In fact I think the new town hall was among the first things I saw. There is a lot of interesting architecture around Bonn. It seems like a medium sized city that had to go through a lot to reidentify itself after the changeover from being the capital of West Germany to just being a city again when the wall fell. During the walk we each got an ice cream cone as well. She had mango flavor and I had cappuccino. It was quite good. She said it was her favorite place for ice cream. I think that was before the university. Also I got to see the Rhein. It is much more a functional river than a tourist river as say in Paris or London. I didn’t see any tour boats out there but there were definitely ferries. They don’t appear to have a lot of bridges across it around Bonn.
Out in a suburb there is a small town called Koenigswinter which has some medieval castle ruins that she wanted to take me to so we started our way to the train that would get us there. We had 15 minutes to kill so we walked further on and she got us a doenner to split. It is basically what I would call a gyro. We had a chicken one. It was good but a real mess to eat and I think the guy could have mixed things up a bit better. We finished those on the train as we had cut it kind of tight. The train ride was about half an hour to forty minutes. Along the way an elderly woman yelled at a kid who was playing with a lighter on the train. Good for her I thought. The kid was punky but he did eventually listen to her which surprised me. The ruins are called Drachenfels. It means dragon rock. There are 7 hills to climb to make it to the top where the ruins are. The hills are quite steep and you can instead take a cog railway up but we missed the timing and chose to walk. It was nice but the humidity was painful for me. We made it up though. It was very similar to the walk from Hohenschwangau to Neuschwanstein. While we were getting near the top we stopped to take pictures of the views. There is another castle there as well that was already closed when we got there. It is a fairly impressive gothic looking building but Kate didn’t know a lot about it. She had never been in it. As we neared the top we found a couple baby mice near a bench which we used to sit down for a few minutes. They were cute, and with very short tails. I took a small video of them.
At the top the ruins felt like some of the stuff I had seen in Sicily. It was kind of nice up there. The view was very beautiful. It was strange to see a completely forested set of hills just right there next to where we were on one side and a city on the other. It gave a good view of Bonn and you can even see Cologne in the distance. The place is basically open to the public and it was good to see it was basically clean and free of graffiti there. We stayed up there for a couple minutes then walked back down. Kate hated walking down more than up due to the steepness at times. We had to wait about half an hour for the train and got a couple sprinkles of rain but that was fine too. We took the train back to town and got out at a different stop than we started from and she walked me through the area that made up the most of the political buildings that were used when Bonn was the capital. There is a strange looking statue of the head of Konrad Adenauer that makes him look sort of like a vampire. There is also their equivalent building to the White House to see. From there we walked to the museum building we had seen from the University. It definitely appeared to be a former palace. Now it houses a geological and zoological museum. Natural history I guess. After the brief stop there we went to have dinner.
It was already about 9:30 by then and we got to the restaurant at about 10:00. Fortunately they stay open to midnight. The place is called the Café Roha. They serve Ethiopian food. Kate really likes it and says she has been there four or five times since she has been back in Bonn. I have never had Ethiopian food so I liked the idea of something different. I had an Erdinger weisbier and we ordered a combination plate for 2. Basically it is a lot of different things to eat that you pick up with bread and just eat with your hands. The food was quite good. There was some lamb and pork and a lot of vegetable type things such as lentils and spinach and potatoes and a scary looking hard-boiled egg. I liked that a bit of the food was spicy, which is not something I have had since I have been in Europe this trip. It was too spicy for Kate but she must have like it anyway because she continued eating. We stuck around and had a second drink at the restaurant before find a place to have one last beer then we could catch the night bus back to the house. The service at this place wasn’t the best but we managed to get our drink and then get back out. Kate had something I had never considered trying which is beer with soda mixed in. It was coke and beer basically. I tried a sip and thought it was just too strange. The carbonation of the coke changed the carbonation feel of the beer. Anyway I think I could skip on it. The apparently will also mix Sprite and orange sodas as well.
The night bus takes a lot longer to get to her house than the two stops it took on the day bus so we actually got out early and then walked about 10 minutes to the house where she set me up in her brother’s room as he was not in and then I crashed for the night almost immediately. I think we got in near 2:00am. I was very tired.
No comments:
Post a Comment