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Bonn - April 2003

BonnIt was 2pm when we reached the Hotel Ibis in Bonn. After leaving our cases, we headed for the city centre and had lunch at a café close to the town hall. We both had rather nice salads and apple juice for about 20€. Then we went to look at Beethoven’s house – my primary reason for visiting Bonn. It was very moving. I couldn’t help crying when I saw his crude hearing aids and his glasses. It has always amazed me that a man who couldn’t hear or see could have written such wonderful music. There were lots of other personal effects – his baby hat, his pianos. A life mask and a death mask were on display as were many other representations including a wonderful bust by Naoum Aronson, on a pedestal in the garden.

BonnAfterwards, we looked around the city centre and Norman found some comfortable shoes in a department store. After dropping these back at the hotel, we walked down to the River Rhine and a little way along the bank. The river is quite wide here and there were lots of boat trips advertised. We had a pleasant walk through some gardens above the river banks and then cut up through the university area, past the Egyptian Museum, to the cathedral. It was time to start looking at menus.

We eventually ate at Em Höttche Das Hist Gasthas am Rath – a restaurant in the market square next to the town hall. It was the place where Beethoven had danced with his first love – long before the place was bombed and rebuilt, of course. I don’t know whether Beethoven ever ate there, but we wished we hadn’t bothered.

It was spargel season in Germany and consequently every restaurant had a spargel menu. Spargel is asparagus. We both decided to have the asparagus and crab cocktail, which sounded delicious. When it arrived it was a prawn cocktail in a heavy pink sauce which completely obscured the flavour of both the prawns and the tiny amount of asparagus. Well, it might have been a translation problem but there was no sign of any crab! Norman’s salt beef turned out to be gammon steak with sauerkraut and mashed potatoes, which he said was all right but no better than that. I had pork fillet wrapped in bacon with fried potato, tomato, mushrooms, brown gravy, cheese sauce and salad. I left most of it; I couldn’t taste anything apart from brown gravy and cheese sauce. It only cost 39.50€, including beer, but we wouldn’t have returned to the place for a free meal! We decided to have coffee elsewhere before returning to the hotel.

BonnWe left the hotel at about 9.30am the next morning, thinking we should easily find the way out of town. After all, we only needed to return by the same route we had come into town. Unfortunately, the hotel was on a one-way street, so we couldn’t go the way we wanted to. Eventually we found ourselves on the way to Coblenz on a parallel motorway to the one we wanted. Oh well, at least we were out of Bonn!

 

 





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