A Visit to the Land of Beer and Pork

As usual, the author(s) intended to write this post 3-4 weeks ago.  Really.  We were thinking about it the whole time.  Writing that down has made me realize that the saying, "It's the thought that counts," is actually followed by an unspoken asterisk denoting several terms and conditions, one of which is that the thought must be connected with at least some action, however misplaced.  For instance, before now, I had taken no action towards writing this post.  This inaction precludes me from begging for the reader's goodwill by saying, "Yeah, but it's the thought that counts."

If you're thinking "What does this have to do with beer or pork?" you are my kind of reader.  The answer is: nothing.  Unless you were merely thinking about beer and pork without doing anything about it.

You may also be wondering "Where is this magical land?"  If you guessed Belgium, I'd say "No, a little to the reich."  *everyone groans*  No, no, not Luxembourg, a little fuhrer over. *more groaning* Okay... fine. I'll just tell you. It's Germany.

Germany!

Sunrise over the Rhine.

Maybe our perspective has been altered by six months under the umbrella of Islam, or maybe Germany is just awesome, but Germany was awesome.  The organization Jenn works for has an office in Bonn and both the flight time and the length of stay were appropriate for Q and I to tag along for her mission to the fatherland.  We left Abu Dhabi in early May, where daily temperatures had already started hitting triple digits, and landed in springtime Frankfurt.  We enjoyed a solid week of perfect weather: clear and sunny with daytime highs in the upper 70s (Fahrenheit), dropping down into the 50s at night.  We wore jackets a couple of times!  And long pants!  (Disclaimer: according to everyone there, this was an unusually pleasant week.  Apparently, both before and after we left it was more like 53 and rainy.)

Horse-chestnut blossoms (Aesculus hippocastanum)

So, after we checked into our hotel in the heart of old town Bonn, Jenn had to head into the office for the afternoon.  Q and I headed to the cafe on the square right outside our hotel.  That's right, beer and pork for lunch.  (Q had the pork, I had the beer.)  Outside.  Right in front of everyone.  Then we took naps.  After naptime, we began what would become a week-long tour of playgrounds in Bonn, Germany.  I somehow didn't take a picture of the sign explaining the playground rules: no dogs, no helmets (why?), and no beer.  I didn't think much of it at the time, but after a week it seemed that this playground was the only public place in Bonn where one couldn't drink beer.

The Markt. We stayed at Stern Hotel (first awning on the left). The white building is the Altes Rathaus.

We met Jenn for supper (more beer and pork) and then tried to find something in English on the TV. This was not as easy as you might think.  If you have never watched Orange County Choppers or Mythbusters overdubbed in German, you are not missing out.  The worst thing about our stay was the bedding. Our room came with three single beds (two pushed together for Jenn and I), each of which came with a very large square pillow and a heavy comforter that was not proportional to the mattress. The comforters were placed on the beds folded in half, the wrong way, so that you could either sleep in them like meat in a taco or unfold and rotate them, letting different parts of you not be covered.  I wondered if we were doing something wrong, or if the staff there had read a poorly translated manual.

The hotel's breakfast, however, was delicious.  Although it was relatively small, the buffet offerings were fresh and tasty in that way that food is in most of Europe.  There were only three kinds of muesli, but there were at least 7 kinds of pork.

Q and I spent the next few days wandering around town, playing on the playgrounds and other fixed objects.  Bonn is fairly small, with a decent subway, and a beer-selling establishment about every hundred feet.  The town and its outlying villages stretch along both banks of the Rhine, which serves as a major shipping conduit for everything from gravel to grain.  Bonn itself might be considered an outlying stretch of Cologne, which was only a few miles downstream, but we only passed through there in transit.  Although we didn't go inside, the Kolner Dom was right next to the train station and we got a pretty good look from the platform. 

This is not it.

One of the more permanent play structures in town. The Rhine in the background.

But it just sat there, unmoved.

They're sad cause they ain't got no body.

Perhaps the most famous landmark in Bonn is the Beethoven-Haus, birthplace of the composer.  In terms of ubiquity, Beethoven in Bonn reached levels almost as high as George Washington in D.C.  His name or likeness was on everything from street signs and statues to buildings and boats. 

The front door of Ludwig's old pad.

Beethoven had a serious head of hair.

Speaking of boats, Q and I did a Rhine cruise aboard the mighty Moby Dick.  When I asked the ticket agent whether there would be beer available on board, she just laughed.  We sat right in front, on the upper deck, enjoying the view, the wind, and the fact that the sun was at about 30% intensity, compared to Abu Dhabi.  The middle Rhine valley is lovely. We traveled three hours upstream from Bonn, passing green rolling hills dotted with the occasional castle and quaint little towns sprinkled every few kilometers along each bank.  We ate sausages and drank pints of draft weissbier and kolsch.  

Thar she blows.

Our last day was a Saturday, and our flight wasn't until evening, so we went along with Jenn and a few of her co-workers to one of the nearby castles we had seen from the river.  The castle sat perched atop one of the taller hills along the river, with easy access provided by a gear-driven tram.  The weather had turned cold and windy, so we rode up, had beers and flammkuchen (a kind of pizza-like thing topped with bacon, onions, and creme fraiche), and rode back down. 

We ended our stay in Bonn with one last beer-pork hurrah: we spent all the spare Euro change we had left on landjager from the charcuterie food truck in the Markt and sat in the hotel lobby drinking beer from the convenience store until it was time to head back to the train station in Cologne.  And then we drank beer on the train.

Auf Wiedersehen, Germany. You rock.