Il faut avoir Bonn culture!

I spent yesterday in Bonn with INCAS, the international students club in Aachen. Our merry band of 25 men and women of all nations (well, chinese, indonesian, german, french, rumanian, columbian, …) boarded an early train to Cologne, then on to Bonn. Our first stop was the former Bundestag, the building that housed german parliament from 1992 to 1999. The building is modernist, very transparent and slightly understated – it looks like an Ikea convention center, actually. I do like it, however. It represents our country better than the Berlin parliament’s “Look how important we are” marble facade, although it might not impress every dictator that comes to visit Bonn right away. The sweetest thing was the waterworks building that housed parliament 87-92, while the new building was under construction. It’s so tiny! Parliament itself hardly fits inside the walls, and visitors had to be rotated. It was also only marginally glamorous.

After a lunch break on the rhine bank meadows, we walked to one of Bonn’s many excellent museum, the House of German History. This museum is dedicated mostly to the history of the federal republic (and communist east germany). It’s basically advertisement for our (relatively) new democracy, but quite interesting nevertheless. The tour wasn’t so great, but some of the pieces exhibited were. I found an instruction manual given to american occupation soldiers right after WW2 (the instructions on behaviour were both nuanced, even-handed and practical and they showed a considerable concern for universal ethics and justice). Other interesting pieces were the proposals for a new flag after the war, the BMW Isetta (aka little death trap)  and facts surrounding youth organisation in the east.

After the museum, our official program was over, and we split into groups of five for the rest of the day. My group went straight to the “Rheinkultur” festival, a no-entrance-fee open air that is hosted once a year by the city of Bonn. There were five stages spread over the grounds, with dozens of concession stands in between. Crowds were thick (about 180.000 visitors in total), and the mood was high. We started off by listening to one of my favorite bands, Schandmaul (gothic folk rock) for an hour, before wandering around a little bit between stages. We had some grub, then I tried to get onto a trampolin to do some jumping. Unfortunately, it’s only safe up to 90 kg, which is less than what I weigh. So no go. Instead, we had a look at the techno stage (which would later be taken off the air by a power outage, haha). Rain demanded temporary shelter, which was found in a beer stand. The music concluded with Sportsfreunde Stiller, a rather famous german… well, punk band.

We left a little bit early, walked to central station, took a VERY FULL train to Cologne, then another one to Düren, where we had to get out because of track repairs. Some busses took us to Eschweiler, were a train was waiting for us… not. Six hundred people stranded at four AM and not happy. The next train came half an hour later and was really small, so that was extremely crowded, too. We were all pretty much ready to bomb Deutsche Bahn at that point, but were way too tired. I finally got home at five and slept till noon. End of the day.