Cologne - Side trip to Bonn

We walked through the town center to meet Kirsty and take a day trip by train to the place of Beethoven’s birth and home of the Beethoven Museum: Bonn. Before the tour of the home we got to attend and interact with a new media experience of the Beethoven opera "Fielellio". The characters of the opera were represented as 3-D graphical images which could be manipulated by computer controls placed in the room. While the controls occupied the children’s attention adults were able to enjoy the opera without many of the typical distractions and limitations. We took the tour of the museum in Deutch, which Kirsty translated for us. We then took a nice stroll along the Rhine, passing the Kennedy Bridge. While we all are familiar with Kennedy's famous "Eich bein Ein Berliner" speech, it was Kirsty who had to inform me how Kenney was highly credited with the reconciliation between eastern and western Germany. It was today that I put many pieces of our trip together (Europe's long and rich history, modification of people's names as they departed Ellis Island, and the Indian wars up in Canada) to come to a realization on how short changed we are in our teaching of American History in our public schools. In short, we do not teach American History. We teach only the history of the colonization of the United States by Europeans. The greatest span of our history belonging to native Americans who's history is (or was while I was in high school) largely ignored. . We saw some Magnolia trees in bloom as well as several of the former embassy buildings. We then took the tram to a small town on the Rhine for a nice lunch on the river. These cigarette machines were everywhere. This one was particularly interesting to me as it was stuck in the middle of someone’s front lawn! There were more smokers in Germany than many places we have been. But I think that even in Germany smoking has begun to pass its heyday. Of course at lunch we get to have more German beer. What is not to like about Germany!! We then took the tram back to our hotel in Cologne passing several large industrial areas along the way.