Germany – Bruehl and Bonn Trip

A day of castles! One more beautiful than the next. They’re all Baroque style and just gorgeous! The first two were in Bruehl, between Cologne and Bonn (the German capital for many years after WWII).
The Augustusburg Palace was beautiful, and the inside was available to view with a tour. There’s nothing in the way of original furniture because it all had to be sold to pay for the many palaces (20!) that Clemens Augustus built.But with the internal glory needs none. Speaking of the internals – no photos were allowed so I took photos of some of the beautiful pages in the picture book that was available for sale (but much too heavy for me):



From here we walked through the palace’s UNESCO listed gardens to the little hunting castle, 2 1/2 km away. This one was called Falkenlust (joy of falconry):
 


We’d hoped to catch a bus back to the train station, but there is no public transport anywhere near there, so we had to walk back. Sore feet and all. We hopped on the train and were off to Bonn a few minutes later.
We stopped for lunch at “Im Stiefel” (in the boot) pub. This was quite nicely done in a really old-fashioned style:

Next stop was the Beethoven House (where he was born). This wasn’t really that interesting – though it might be more fascinating if you could read and play music. We spent a while in there anyway and eaves-dropped on a tour that was going on. The house wasn’t really very big, but then Beethoven’s family wasn’t super-rich:

We headed to the Old City Hall and square. Unfortunately, Old City Hall was being renovated and thus hidden behind a cloth facade:

From here we went in search of some more palaces. These are being used by various faculties of the university in Bonn. It’s nice that these buildings are being used and maintained, but sad we couldn’t get in for a good look around:

After this first palace, we stopped for some coffee across from the pretty cathedral:
 

It has a lovely cloister as well:


And saw more pretty buildings:
 

We headed in the direction of the Poppelsdorfer Palace (also a university building), which is about 1km across a park from the first palace we saw earlier. There’s gorgeous villas and houses lining the streets on both sides of the interconnecting park.

As well as this, there’s an ‘open library shelf’. This is a cupboard containing a few shelves with books that you can borrow or take home and replace with something else if you like. Brilliant idea, I thought. There were a few people hanging around looking at books, so it obviously gets used:

Poppelsdorfer Palace:


There are beautiful gardens at the back of the uni. These are open to the public for free during the week, but they charge admission on the weekend:



And more pretty buildings on the way to the bus stop:

Germany – Muenster

Muenster is nice except for the bikes. It’s a student town, surrounded by a park and its palace has been turned into a university building. There’s bikes parked everywhere and worse, people riding them all over the place, sometimes with trailers that are actually baby prams. And they go everywhere: the road, the footpath…you’re not safe from them anywhere! I don’t know how many times we were nearly run down by bikes!
But aside from that, the buildings in the old centre are pretty:

The arcades everywhere have been maintained, unlike in England:

We went into City Hall to view the Friedenssaal (peace room) (only 1.50 Euro each) which has seen quite a few successful peace negotiations and treaties signed:


 
The rooster has a funny story attached. It’s a gold plated silver statue/goblet tribute to the rooster that saved the city during a siege. It was the last rooster left alive and the people were starving. The mayor decided to kill it to feed the people, but it escaped. It ran outside the city walls and the besieging army saw the rooster coming out and thought the city must have an abundance of food – enough to release the rooster – so they gave up and went home. Hence the rooster saved the city:

Next stop was the market next to the cathedral. We’d heard the market was fantastic, so we wandered through it and stopped to taste lots of yummy things – enough we didn’t even need lunch (though it didn’t stop us having some…):

Then we went into the first of many churches today. This was the St Paul’s Cathedral:
 

Another church – Ueberwasserkirche (over water church):

And the University Church (no longer used as a church):

Then we wandered around town for a little while, in search of another church. We were getting a little peckish, so we stopped for lunch:

Getting closer:
  

  
And here it was – the St Lambert church. The organ hangs from ceiling in a scary way, I must say!:



Oh look: another church!:


And on the way to a church around the corner we came across this naughty dog… before stopping for coffee:

Hey! There’s a church! St Martin’s:

Then it was high time we got to the palace (being used by the University) before it got too dark to take photos. The way there was through the park that surrounds Muenster:
 

And the palace (university). Unfortunately, the building is being renovated at the front, so not so pretty:


The back looked good though, especially in the late sunshine:
 
Then we found a bus to take us to the central station, since we’d probably done 10kms today and our feet hurt!