Bonn

Our trip started in Bonn after we arrived in Frankfurt. We rented the car at the airport- I thought I had a BMW reserved, but when I asked them for a navigation system, it threw them for a loop. After some scrambling, we ended up with a KIA Sonata-which was a tad bit too big for the places we were going.

“It is an automatic, right?”

“Ja, Ja”.

Well it wasn’t,  which meant I was going to be doing all of the driving. The S.O. can’t even spell manual transmission-much less drive one.

However as the trip went on the car performed very well-and the navigation system worked great- saving us from arguments. The S.O. has no sense of direction-but like most women will not admit that is the case. Also, for someone who lived in Tokyo-she also could be curiously unaware of her surroundings at times-I had to grab her on three different occasions to keep her from walking out into the street in front of cars she did not seem to know where there.

Why Bonn? I asked the same question. Because the S.O. had seen a travel program that featured Beethoven and he was Born in Bonn. I actually liked the place once we got there-the S.O. seemed underwhelmed. But it was nice. Our hotel:

Which had an added bonus of having a bier garden in the basement. It called itself an Irish pub-but it was more of a German bar then Irish. Still, it was popular on a Saturday night with the UN crowd. ( The UN has some sort of headquarters in Bonn).

We went off to explore the Christmas market though:

Where they had interesting, albeit expensive, things for sale:

The ice rink was not quite ready:

We did get some pictures of the Rhine right before sunset:

And the river itself:

And we walked back through the university where we met this guy:

I’ll bet its nice here in the spring.

And finally, it was back to the Christmas market for beer and sausage bread. Where we just happened to meet these guys:

They moved and sang in German.

The Weinachtsmarkt was open for its first night when we got there-and doing a brisk business. I have often wondered why this little tradition did not emigrate here to the US with all of the German immigrants who settled in Shopping Mall and other towns. Oh yea-because we don’t have vibrant downtown shopping districts like they do in Europe!