Cologne, Beethoven and Rheinkultur

It’s down to six. Six weeks before I have to strap myself to an airplane seat and leave Germany. But it’s not time to say goodbye just yet so I will make sure to cram a trip in each and every one of those weekends, as well as become more fluent in German in the meantime. I feel like it is pointless to just sightsee over the short span of a weekend but until I find another deeper meaning for “traveling”, simply sightseeing will have to do. It will be a while before I get to be back here again. Although going home to Canada is not a bad prospect at all, but experience tells me I am going to feel like I never left. I don’t want to feel like that ever.

This weekend, it was my turn to visit Köln and Bonn. I wanted to visit Köln ever since I got to Germany, as I know it has very easy access to where I am living right now. Andrew, another Canadian RISE student working at the Forschungzentrum, heard from his PhD student about a popular music festival happening over the weekend in Bonn called Rheinkultur. All we knew was that it is a free festival happening yearly to showcase the talents of local and international bands – new ones and big names alike – so it seemed like a good idea to see what the hype was all about and make this into a two-cities-one-day trip. Turns out, it is the largest free music festival in Germany, gathering about 200,000 fans of music of every genre around 5 stages and about 12 hours of non-stop shows. Another plus was the impressive pricing of the train tickets: 27.50 euros for a day-pass for the whole North Rhine-Westphalia region PER group of up to 5 people! Crazy cheapness!

Before getting to the Rheinkultur festival, we got off the train in Köln (our transit to Bonn) and visited the Dom, walked around the shopping district and experienced the Berliner doughnut and currywurst (two firsts for me). I love the texture of Berliner doughnuts, its sandy sugar exterior and cotton insides. I would have eaten it just for the texture itself, even if it tasted like Chinese medicine. The next stop of the day was in Bonn. I loved that city. It still gave the feeling of a medieval town, but the painted version. I don’t know if it was like that in the past, but the houses were all so vibrantly colourful. Beethoven’s house was pink and green???

At the music festival, so many people showed up despite the scorching heat. The truth is, I am scared of hot weather and as always, was painfully numbed by the heat on that day. It would have been nice to stay until the evening, after the temperature cools down but we had to leave by 6:30pm to catch the train back to Jülich. Also, perhaps if we stayed longer, I would have been able to hear some female artists but it was unfortunately not the case… where were they?