Bonn and Cologne
Today we left the city around 6 in the morning. This was starting to feel like our adventure was in the thick of it, and the new ness of excitement was starting to turn into a grind to see everything. Don’t get me wrong, we were still very excited, but t was starting to turn into our daily goa verse our daily fun. Our first goal of the day was to get to the city of Bonn, to see nonthing other than Beethovens birthplace. As a pianist one could only imagine the excitement that I had going to my all time music idols birthplace and residence.
The train itself was only about 2 hours to get tot he city, and of course the town is not just comprised of Beethovens house. It is actually quite a large cit near Cologne Germany, which is our stop first thing in the morning. Our first order of business was to check into our hotel in Cologne before we took the connecting train to Bonn. Fortunately the hotel was only about 200 yds from the train station. For such a good location I was very impressed with the price. We paid ….. for one night in the city. This location allowed us to get to Bonn and explore a good amount of Cologne the rest of the day. cOlogne itself is one of germanys largest cities, so there would be no way to see all of it by the end of half a day. Either way, we checked in to …. and we were on our way to the train station to head back toward Bonn.
Before we hoped on the train however, one cannot not realize the massive cathedral near the train station. This is the enormous ….. church, which is the primary cathedral of Cologne, and if I am right the largest or one fo the largest in Germany and all of Europe. WE took about half an hour to see the early morning sunlight in this impressive cathedral. It was so enormous that it was not possible to fit the entire building in a picture from the train station. Since it was only about 300 yds from the station, you can imagine how big it is based on these pictures below. We spent about 30 minutes touring the inside of the church with very few people as the hours were still early for most people. It was a great experience to see the church with no crowds and be able to be at peace in the enormous monument to Christ. One could only imagine who had visited this church, how much it cost, and the amount of labor/ geometry went into creating it.
Now, with no more distractions insight, it was time to head to Bonn. the train station of Bonn is relatively small, but the good news is its very close to the cities downtown area, and a short walk to the public park, and other tourist areas. As with most cities in Europe there are many church spires that litter the towns sky line of Bonn, so we did not have time to explore every cathedral, but the primary two near the train station we were able to go in and see. beethovens house was only about a 500yd walk from the train station to his front door. Of course there are tours to see the inside, but it was only 10 in the morning, and it may have been closed because we did not see a daily tour option. Either that was fine with me to say I had seen it and touched the house of this historic giant of music. Later in this trip we would visit his grave in Vienna, but we will cover that later.
Now with that being done, we decided to explore the town square where his place is close to. There was a local wedding going on at the time, so there was a small crowd gathered for the event so we decided to let them have their space and head to the local daily market put on in the square. This was similar to Nuremburgs square with local vendors and farmers selling theirs good to the public in open aired space. This was obviously a great local gathering spot, as you find anything from Vegetables, Fruits, means and cheese, along with specialty drinks and on site meals made to order from certain locations. WE decided to get a handful of strawberries and grapes to sit and observe the town energy. This was a great and well deserved rest stop as we had a very busy morning already since leaving Frankfurt! We decided to go down the main park area to see if there was any special outdoor attraction here. Upon arriving at the public park we realized we had followed the wedding all the way to the main capital building????? Either way, this would end our time in Bonn, as we had seen the primary features on my to do list here. It was about 2pm? Thus we decided to head back to Cologne and explore the downtown area.
There was still about 5 hours of daylight left to explore, so we decided to divide it up into exploring each side of the river, and walk the massive bridge that the train station is connected to. With this in mind we went from the train station west of the river (which it is already located on). The main drag of the walking are aof the city was located directly outside the cathedral walls we discussed earlier. We decided it was time for a beer. Thus we hopped into a local bar called…. This was relatively slow traffic at the time because I guess germany hadn’t begun their drinking session yet. haha. However there was this odd fellow at the end of the bar talking to a puppet and then talking to us through the puppet. WE couldn’t understand him, and I wasn’t sure if he knew we didn’t speak german, but either way we oddly laughed, chugged our beer, and got the hell out of there! This was in interesting day so far, but I was not about to get followed by a weirdo. Nonetheless, we continued with our exploration of cathedrals. We stopped at two more in the day time before heading across the bridge.
This bridge connected the east and west side of the city, with car traffic, and train traffic leading to the station. The good art of this town is the close proximity of the station to everything in the city. One of our bucket list items of the day was a bar called Gasttatte. This was one of the most historic bars in the entire country, and was particularly enjoyable knowing the setup. One….it was almost 700 years old, but the way they did business was for their own Kolsch beer to be ordered at their bar and then picked up at the end. Doesn’t sound unique I know, but it was so busy that people would just sit outside on the curb to drink. From this point the small 10 oz glass of beer one gets goes quite quick, so you would have a server come out and just bring you more beer until you said no. In fact, one was not even instructed to pay until you were done, and it was almost the honors system here. They asked how many we had, and I believe it was 7 as they were small and only 1 EU each. This was just a unique experience sitting not he curb and seeing the german local sing dance, laugh and be friendly. It was a great experience as the sun was going down.
We decided we were hungry but didn’t feel like spending a ton on dinner tonight. There was a mcdonalds at the train station so we decided to order from there and take it to our hotel room and enjoy. This was a good decision as their was enough day light when we were done to actually head back to the city to enjoy a few more sites as you can see below.
It was time to put a cap to this busy day and head to the hotel for good. We had another early morning ahead of us, so it was necessary to get a little rest, as we had to head to Luxembourg then next day.
(5:29 ICE 222 to Koeln chg IC 2319 6:53-7:12 ) to bonn
WALKING ROUTE:
Bonn Train
Namen Jesu Kirche
Beethoven Haus Bonn
Bonn market
Alter Friedhof
Poppelsdorfer
Schloss Drachenburg
(RE 10512 10:02-10:28) to Cologne
Cologne tRain
Three Kings Shrine
brauhaus Sion
Fruh am Dom
Historical City Hall
Dominican Chruch of st andrew
Lysophstrum
Medieval Twon Wall
St Ursula
Hotel Berg
HOTEL:hotel berg $56.40 cologne 148015906389 CONFIRMED
EXPENSES
2.60 dunkin donuts
3.50 fruit bonn
7.50 breakfast
2.40 room tax
25.80 lunch at peters brauhaus
9.80 beer cologne
8.20 beer cologne
14.60 beer lommerzheim gestate
10.36 Mcdonalds
Total – 84.36 (30.50 + 2= 32.50 over budget)