While, of course, there are practically endless things to see and do in Paris, there are also a number of other places in Europe that I wanted to visit while I’m here – one of those places is Bonn, Germany. Last weekend, I finally had a chance to go there. I got up at 4:00 a.m. Saturday morning, walked to the nearest RER train station (about 20 minutes from my homestay by foot – normally I would have taken the metro there, but it doesn’t run at 4:00 a.m. in the morning, unfortunately for me) and boarded the RER B (as I wrote about last week, the RER is the regional train that goes outside of Paris proper into the suburbs), heading North out of the city towards Charles De Gaulle airport (named after an eminent former French president, as many things in Paris are). From there, I flew to Frankfurt, Germany, where I took an airport shuttle to the train station, where I got on another train – a German highspeed “ICE” (intercity express”) train – which arrived in Bonn around lunchtime on Saturday. All those trains and planes, as well as all the walking in between, added up to about six hours of traveling.
Why go to so much trouble? The first reason, for me, is that Bonn is the hometown of Beethoven.
