The month of May in Germany is jam packed with state holidays, and although they don�t all offer up long weekends, they do give you the chance to take off somewhere right smack-dab in the middle of the week. As you might guess, that�s exactly what I did on a Wednesday morning with Michelle. We took the subway pretty much the length of its route from downtown Cologne to the rich suburbs just south of Bonn. We got out in Konigswinter at Clemens August Str., another reminder of how powerful the man who built the palace we had visited with Lalith must have been. (link) Our destination was a small castle nestled in the hills that rise up above the Rhine in this area. It is called Schloss Drachenfels, (the Dragon Cliffs Palace). It was built at the turn of the last century by an eccentric old man and owned by a string of similarly strange people until the last decade when the palace was bought by the state. The palace (or house) is richly decorated, although there are still a few odd things here and there left by the owner during the 1960s, including bits of a gold bed-frame that act as decoration over the dining room door, and some awful slime green trim around some of the doors. The best part though is a huge organ in the sitting room which looks a little strange at first glance, because although it seems far too large for the room, it isn�t exactly large for an organ. In fact, it only has half the number of pipes to play the proper range of notes, and thus was never functional. That however never stopped it�s owner and builder from inviting over friends for organ concerts that he �performed� with the aid of a cassette recorder. The oddity of the place aside, it offers a fantastic view of the Rhine valley from it�s perch, and the town of Konigswinter itself is very pretty and picturesque, with charming winding streets, and loads of shops that only a wealthy suburb could support.
The following weekend, we found ourselves riding the same train back to Bonn, this time for a fireworks display called Rhine in Flames. AIESEC in Bonn organized a large barbeque for students from all over Germany that wanted to visit the city for the weekend, so there were nearly fifty of us by the end of the night. The party was great with people from all over the world, even a few other Canadians showed up from Vancouver and Victoria along with others from Switzerland, Chile, Peru, Russia, Portugal, the UK and who knows where else. The fireworks went off according to plan, but unfortunately during a torrential downpour that forced us to avoid our original vantage point from a park (it was washed out) and so instead we watched from afar on a bridge. We saw all the big ones, but were too far away to hear any of the music.
