Dear me, I am behind again, for reasons I'll explain later.
After breakfast we left Koblenz and sailed back down the rather less interesting part of the Rhine, back towards Cologne. Just before lunch we moored in Bonn, and after lunch, we set off on a guided walk round the city.
As well as having been the capital of West Germany for some time, Bonn is known as the birthplace of Beethoven, so our first visit was to the Beethoven House, which is now a museum. The house, as you can see, has a baroque stone facade was apparently erected around 1700 on an older cellar vault. It is one of the few remaining middle-class houses from that era.
Originally, this was the neighbourhood preferred by the employees of the courts, in the heart of the town between the castle, the town hall with the market square and the banks of the Rhine river. Today it is still in the centre of town and is a pedestrian precinct.
It looks quite imposing, but five families lived in the multi-storey front and back buildings, and there were also shops here. The imposing door was only created nearly 70 years after Beethoven's birth, when the earlier door was widened to create a gate entrance.
Beethoven's father was a singer at the court, and had to supplement his income by giving music lessons, indeed the family was quite poor and only had a few attic rooms at the back of this building - the front rooms were more expensive.
This is the courtyard at the back of the building, looking back towards the street.
Beethoven was born in one of the upper rooms at the right of my photograph - probably the one with the open shutters.
The family only lived here until 1774, when Beethoven was about 4, but the other houses in which the family lived later no longer exist. And of course Beethoven left Bonn in 1792. Unfortunately, no photographs are allowed inside the house, where you can see interesting documents, like Beethoven's baptism entry in the church register of the St. Remigius church, portraits of Beethoven's employers, silhouettes and portraits of his family and friends, portraits of his later teachers Haydn and Salieri, and so on.
There are larger and more interesting things which I would have liked to photograph, such as the console of the organ that once stood in the St. Remigius church and that Beethoven had regularly played from the time he was ten years old. There are two pianos, one of them Beethoven's last piano, and a set of string quartet instruments. He had to support the family himself after 1784, and he moved to Vienna in 1792, so many of the later things you see come from the Vienna period. His hearing problems are documented by his very strange looking ear trumpets and a conversation booklet, in which people wrote down things they wanted to say to him - easier than shouting down the ear trumpet I daresay! Letters, notes, various contemporary music instruments and items of daily life give an idea of him as a human being. And of course there is his death mask.
I had to content myself with a photograph of the garden.
As you can see, there are two busts of Beethoven in the garden.
These are, naturally, not the only statues of Beethoven in the city; there is a Beethoven Monument on the Münsterplatz, one of the main squares.
Franz Liszt is largely responsible for this statue. He contributed not only financially but also organised concerts from which the funds were put towards the cost of the statue.
On one side of the square is the Bonn Minster, one of Germany's oldest churches. It has five towers, square flanking towers on the east end, a round central tower 315 feet (96m) high, and two slender turrets on the west end. All the towers are topped with spires. Sadly, I couldn't get far enough away to photograph more than a small portion of it.
When I say it's old, I really mean it; apparently there might have been a religious building on the site as early as the 4th century, and this was expanded several times, particularly in the 8th century. Around 1050 this early church was demolished and construction began on the present Romanesque building, which dates from the 11th to 13th centuries. By the end of the 13th century, Bonn had grown in importance, becoming the capital of the Electorate and Archbishopric of Cologne, which was then a separate sovereign state.
Lying in the open plaza on the east end of the basilica are large sculpted heads of the Roman martyrs Cassius and Florentius, the patron saints of Bonn. According to legend, Saints Cassius and Florentius were beheaded for their religious beliefs at the present location of the Bonn Minster. The two enormous sculpted heads I have photographed here, rather badly, were sculpted in 2002.
By this time I was feeling quite martyred myself, suffering from dreadful heartburn and indigestion and getting terrible backache from the slow pace of the walking tour. We were at a standstill far too often, and I don't think I've ever walked so slowly.
Apart from the Minster, much of medieval Bonn is long gone, but one part that still stands in the Sterntor, a gate from the 13th century city walls. But even this is a bit faked: it's the original design and original bricks, but it's been moved. The original location caused traffic flow problems, and so they moved it, brick by brick, to its present spot, in between two Starbucks.
We weren't able to get a decent view of the Poppelsdorf palace, a giant Baroque building, because there was an enormous lorry parked in the way, and the tour didn't include the long walk there. We did see another palace, now part of the University.
By this time I was beyond enjoying any more of the tour, and we left and went back to the boat. In the evening, there was a gala dinner, though I was hardly able to eat anything. Afterwards there was an entertainment put on by the crew, which Paul refused to attend, so we just went to bed.
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