Bonn

Bonn, the capital city of West Germany from 1949 to 1990, is a medium-sized city located in the western middle of Germany, not far from the French border, and sits right on the edge of the impressively large Rhine river. While not very large in terms of population, it has important historical connotations due to it having been the capital for 40 years, and maintains an unofficial special governmental status with around a third of all ministerial jobs being located in Bonn, and the secondary seat of the President, the Chancellor, and the Bundesrat. In addition to then being a government town, it is also a college town with an important university -- the University of Bonn -- and also an important concentration of UN agencies including the UN Climate Change envoy.

I mention all this because just two short weekends ago I took a solo (solo from the fam, that is) trip on the ICE from München, traveling at just under around 300 km/h, for a long weekend in the former capital of West Germany. While the Pemulis Family has made Germany their home for nearly eight years now, we haven't managed to actually see that much of the country. We've spent some time in the now-capital of Berlin, been a little bit around Bavaria for the mountains, and many years ago I visited my German sister in Hannover and its environs. But beyond that, not much. And so, a German friend, whose parents happen to live in Bonn, invited me for a cultural enrichment tour where we would stay with his parents, visit the Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland covering post-WW2 Germany, bike (on a funny-looking tandem bike called a Hase Pino) along the mighty Rhine a few dozen km's to Köln, and drink Jever with his father while he recounted stories of working as a doctor in nearly every war-torn and/or dilapidated country you can think of.

The train trip was a rather liberating experience because I was by myself for basically the first time in probably a year, the train car was nearly empty, and (related directly to point 1) I could actually read a book without being interrupted or distracted with some disaster to deal with for more than like 5 minutes at a time. Actually, I found it a little bit difficult to stay focused for a long time and had to take many breaks where I just stared out the window for a while because I guess since I haven't really had any opportunities of being uninterrupted for such a long time, I don't really know how to focus for very long at all. Ah well.

In any case, I arrived safely in Bonn and was met at the station and chauffeured to my friend's parents' place in the hills overlooking the Bonn city centre. Even though I arrived rather late (it was around 11 pm I believe), both of his parents were up, and for the first of 3 subsequent nights, we got into the Jever. I learned a great deal about the people of the Rhineland (not the parents), kids these days, and all sorts of things about what the CIA gets up to (or at least used to get up to back in the 60's and 70's), and how to pace oneself while drinking a whole lot of Jever with an 80-something-year-old German left-wing doctor.

While my body was moving for some time before this, I eventually became conscious on Saturday morning after having drunk 3 or 4 large coffees. I was then ready to hit the road: that meant picking up the funny bike at the bike rental store, biking it over to the museum, and spending around 3 hours on my feet reading museum displays in German meticulously covering the waning days of WW2, through the 50's and 60's and the Berlin blockade, through the 70's and 80's and modernization, and finally the 90's and 2000's all the way up to the influx of refugees in 2015 (was it 2015?). Highly recommended place to check out though.

I soaked in the local culture by eating a Döner in a park for lunch and then we biked the Bonn Street Art route which is probably not something the city should advertise if they want to be taken seriously. At this point it was later afternoon and I was pooped (slang for exhausted in case anyone is concerned). We headed home, rested up a bit before dinner, and then actually went out to eat in a restaurant! Wow. If nothing else, Covid sure has made once-standard things seem totally exciting. It was a warm evening, we sat outside at an Indian restaurant where I drank a Kingfisher to prepare myself for the Jever that would later surely come.

Kölner Dom

The next morning we packed up the Pino and headed the 30-40 km north along the Rhine to the much larger city of Köln. The wind was heavy, but we had two-person-pedal-power (plus the e-bike motor of course) and it was a lovely warm, sunny day in the Rhineland. Biking along the Rhine is quite beautiful and it's also impressive to see how big of a river it is. This is not your standard Isar or whatever: it is big and deep and there is constant boat traffic hauling oil and gas and containers of goods and people too. You can almost feel like you're beside a lake or even the sea because of the sight of lots and lots of water and the strong wind that comes off the river.

The Rhine or the South of France? You decide!

Anyways, we finally made it and spent some time around the famous Cathedral which is more than enormous. Enormous times 50 or so. We had some Kölsch (as you do) around the Cathedral and I fuelled up, as I often do, with a plate of Currywurst. On the way back home later that evening, we stopped at a river-side restaurant (the other side of the river this time) and it really felt like being at a beach. Good times. Unlike a smaller river such as the Isar, putting a bridge over the Rhine is no small feat. Therefore, when going to the other side, you need to plan ahead for how you will eventually get back. This time, we took a route that involved crossing a big highway bridge just before Bonn that also involves the necessity of crossing a tiny river in comparison, called the Sieg. Crossing the Sieg was a laugh because there is a tiny little boat where you pay 50 cents and the captain is a surly old guy in a sailor hat and he pushes you across the Sieg with a giant stick. Kind of funny.

Crossing the Mighty Sieg

Back home in Bonn we settled in for our final night of drinking Jever and listening to stories of the old (and, to be fair, recent) times. It was a great experience seeing more of Germany and experiencing it too. Signing off for now... Pemulis.

Lago di Garda

Lake Garda is the biggest lake in Italy and, after Majorca, probably the biggest vacation destination for German holidaymakers. Which is saying a lot, actually, because -- while large, see supra -- and if my stated statistic is actually true (which it may very well be), the lake takes up only around 370 square kilometres and there are a lot of Germans out there. Nestled into the Italian Alps, touching three different Italian regions, it boasts a Mediterranean climate, beautiful surrounding villages bursting with Italian culture, and a geographic proximity such that one can arrive at the northern part of the lake from the Munich city centre in about four and a half hours (much less if you drive as fast as the Germans do).

After somehow surviving at least a handful of lockdowns, complete with school closures, extreme cold, rainy and generally soggy weather, and thus extreme sequestration within our 80 square meters of living space for something like 365 days (plus or minus), it was high time for a vacation. Pemulis donned a certified FFP2 mask and braved the potentially unvaccinated masses on the U2 as he made his way (only third time on the underground in the last year I believe) to the Europcar kiosk at the local train station to collect a very fancy Volvo SUV. He signed away more of his paycheque to secure all manner of (allegedly) required insurances and upgrades and keyed in his home address to the onboard GPS. Later, and as usual, following something that felt like 6 months but was probably closer to around 3 hours, the car was painfully slowly loaded up and finally the family was off! Italy bound at last.

While the Covid-19 "situation" has been improving a lot around these parts as of late, things are still definitely not back to completely normal. As such, there are a number of procedures in place for if and when one so chooses to travel around. For example, when you enter Italy, you need a negative Covid test result from within the last 48 hours for everyone in the car. You also need to fill out a pre-entry clearance form with information on where and when you will enter the country, who is all with you, and where you've been on your journey, and you need to print out this form and carry it with you (who has a printer these days?). If you travel through another country on the way there, you don't need to fill out a pre-entry clearance form for that country, but if you stay in that country at all (other than simply passing through, I mean), you do. So, normally, we wouldn't have to do all this for the required trip through Austria on the way to Italy. But, since the Pemulis family includes two small children, one of whom very stereotypically started asking "are we there yet" about 10 minutes into the journey, and went on to ask said question approximately seven hundred more times before arrival, we decided (ahead of time, of course) to spend the night in Austria on the way there, and therefore had to do the whole procedure for Austria as well.

[Inline footnote: Helga is an "expat kid", I guess you would say. While we speak English at home and with most of our friends, she interacts with other kids either in German or in French. When she watches TV she watches it in German. Neither Pemulis nor Joelle has ever, at least in her presence, asked the "are we there yet?" question and she has never been on a trip with other kids somewhere further than maybe a 15 minute ride. My conclusion is that asking the specific question "are we there yet?" over and over and over ad nauseum is an example of nature, rather than nurture.]

Now, after getting Corona tests all around, collecting the results, planning the route, finding the border crossings for Austria and Italy and the estimated crossing times for each of those borders and filling out personal details such as passport number, place of birth, and known contacts within the last 2 weeks, finding a printer, and realizing that Heinrich's resident card is expired (a bridge we will hopefully cross safely at some point in the near future) we were good to go. Of course, no one at either border ever asked for any of this documentation, and it just sat untouched in my bag for the duration of the vacation. However, having spent nearly 8 years living amongst the Germans, we felt good knowing that we had followed the rules.

The en-route night in Austria was fairly uneventful and by Thursday at lunchtime we had reached the promised land of Lake Garda. Many popular tourist destinations, though surely popular for some reason, never come close to living up to expectations. They are always touristy (imagine!) and never quite as nice as you hoped they would be. Lago di Garda, however, was something else: the natural beauty actually surpassed my expectations. The snow-capped mountains that raise straight from sea level at the lake way up to 2000 metres and beyond are breathtaking. The lake is not only naturally majestic but the towns are so old-world Italy and the climate -- even though the daily highs are not so different from Munich -- so Mediterranean in how it feels and the atmosphere is just really, really nice.

Our hotel was on a small street just off the main road running north-south that hugs the west side of the lake. We stayed just outside of the town of Limone -- home (or perhaps just vacation place) of the rich and beautiful. The hotel had a big swimming pool, a view of the lake, and a 2-minute walk to a beach where we spent some apéro evenings while the kids dug stones and made "soup". Joelle and I each had a chance to do a solo trail "run" (quotation marks because the inclines of the mountains here are so steep that one cannot run) in the surrounding mountains which was really nice but would naturally have been nicer had we been able to do so together. We ventured into Limone proper for lunch a couple of times and found reasonably priced food that, in my professional opinion, ranked as "authentically Italian". We took a boat ride across the lake to the town of Malcesine where we had another delicious lunch and somehow survived the kids' fighting and yelling and general carrying-on which surprisingly did not result in either of them either falling or getting thrown into the water below.

Making Soup

The hotel clientele was probably 80% German and 20% Italian (and then a rounding error: us). Most of what we heard spoken in the streets and on the boat ride and in the restaurants also reflected roughly this ratio of people. The people of the area itself, though, unlike Südtirol where the locals actually speak German as their mother tongue, are Italian but obviously cater to the German tourists and thus people working in the tourist industry tend to speak German. The signs, maps, and other information / documentation is in Italian, German, and often English as well. It's a good place for a family vacation. Highly recommended.