Well I finally have internet again. 3 days at a hotel that claimed to have internet but didn’t was rough. (I’m writing this after the fact on 9/3, making several posts tonight, a couple days late.) Well, I left Hameln and made it to the city of Bonn, and my train went right through the city of Cologne, one of my cities on my last trip with the massive cathedral, and the nearby theme park Phantasialand. I considered going to the theme park again, but ultimately decided against it.

It was a lengthy trip from Hameln to Bonn so I didn’t have much time, but Bonn is famous for two things really. It’s known for being the birthplace of Ludwig van Beethoven, some composer nobody has ever heard of. It’s also the city that became the capital of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, or the Federal Republic of Germany, also known as West Germany when the country was split apart.

The first thing I did when I got into my hotel was head back out (after getting settled in) and making the long, distant walk to the birth house of Ludwig Van Beethoven, an exhausting 33 second walk. I had timed it. My hotel was a 33 second walk from his birth house. Got to go inside and see where he lived for a while, along with see several of his instruments, the pianos that he played among other things. They didn’t like photos inside. It was pretty neat surprisingly. There was also a guy playing a piano on the bottom floor. A tour guide (not mine, as I went alone) also played a version of Ode to Joy as it would have sounded to the nearly deaf Beethoven when he wrote, while I was standing right next to one of his pianos. It was muffled and weak, and quite interesting.

Spent the rest of the day just casually walking around the city. I say Bonn is the city that almost was, because when Germany reunified in 1990 the Bundesrat (the German parliament) voted by a very narrow margin to reinstate Berlin as the capital of unified Germany, instead of permanently keeping it in Bonn. The mediumish-small city of Bonn was specifically chosen in 1949 instead of a major city like Frankfurt to be the capital. Authorities wanted Berlin to be the capital again if there were ever reunification, and if they moved the capital to a major financial city it would have been more difficult to move. Interestingly, nearly half of all federal employees still live and work in Bonn, almost 400 miles away from Berlin, as Bonn still has major federal and ministerial offices. Bonn also has a famous university.