Sunday, May 05, 2013

UNIVERSITAT - MARKT

 I was here.


Two years ago, reminded the pleghm-colored tiled walls of the tunnel, on a rush to catch the last train to Bad Godesberg after overspending time with the Oxfam Team in a pub somewhere in Bonn.

The Universitat-Markt Station is familiar indeed.

But not what is outside of it.

The Universitat

I emerged from the station tunnel into the spacious grounds of the University of Bonn and, on this particular day, to tourists being regurgitated from buses and swarms of people enjoying the first real day of summer in various ways.

My way is to steal shots of them, including the biker below who might have decided that watching an all-girl football game is more fun.


The Markt

The Markt is just across the road in the courtyard of the old Town Hall, hundreds of years of history etched in its cobblestones, its portable food stalls competing with the trendier shops of various sizes for the Euros of the descended summer horde.



I lunched along a store corner the saving-for-pasalubong way --- grilled sausage in bread with catsup (the options are mayonnaise and mustard which for me are yuckier) washed down with Coke, before finally tracking down that elusive and equally hundreds-of-years old Name of Jesus Church on narrow Bonngasse Street, bedecked with enamored birch trees being a May Tree day, and from there revisited the Bonn Minster this time for the crypt beneath the high altar where the decapitated remains of sainted Roman legionnaires Cassius and Florentius are allegedly kept, and to the Bonn City Museum where the silence of the artifacts and my lonesome visitation amplified a whirling sound inside my camera which I heard for the first time, before finally gawking at a huge and greened-with-age statue of an Ernts Moritz Arndt somewhere along the Rhine Promenade











That's when I called it quits and decided to bypass the Juridicum and Museum Koenig Stations for another time.

That night, I met up with Usec. Fred, Jasper, Yeb, and Lando at the Bad Godesberg Station.

That night, we had pansit and oven litson at a Filipino expatriate's birthday party where Lando took us, and politely refused several invitations to do the videoke.





That night, we built a bonfire boy scout style along the Rhine to cut the evening chill and watched as ferry boats paraded for the big moment when the Rhine will rise in flames, failing miserably in our attempt for a tripod-less flash-less low light photography, and somewhat disappointed that high-tech Germany would be a letdown in terms of a fireworks show.





But other than that, it was a big exclamation mark for an otherwise dull week of a workshop and round table discussions...

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