Our first swap in Bad Honnef

Now about the house ! To sum it up we’re very happy about the choice; a very comfortable home on three floors plus the basement with a well landscaped, medium sized garden.The main bedroom has a waterbed. Interesting; I had never slept on one. This will prepare me/us for our next stopover, the houseboat in Amsterdam!

I chose this location for its proximity to Bonn and was lucky to find this exchange partner. The town is called Bad Honnef. Both are situated on the Rhine and the northernmost outposts of the wine growing region in Germany. Our exchnage partners even left us a bottle of white to sample!
(Not our house!)
Our first Chancellor after the war, Konrad Adenauer, was born here in a part of town called Rhoendorf. Bonn, formerly a sleepy village,  became  the capital of Germany in 1949 after World War II.. After Reunification in 1990,  it was moved to Berlin again.

The owners told us the house was app. 80 years old. They must have renovated it a couple of years ago with great taste. All three floors have enough art work to make a gallery proud. The furniture is a mixture of very modern and antiques. Some gadgets are too high tech even for hubby. It took us about 30 minutes to figure out how the coffee maker worked. The result was less than satisfactory: some lukewarm, tasteless liquid the color of dish water came out of that fancy shmanzy machine. Rumor has it they cost about EUR 2000. Seriously? I love my old-fashioned handbrewed and filtered coffee. We bought the equipment for it the same day.

Old houses like this retain the cool when temperatures soar like at present, ca. 26-30 Celsius. Nights are still cold – ca. 10 degrees- so that we don’t feel the summer heat at night. My type of climate.The house is situated in the old part of town where most houses are small and streets very narrow, parking is at a premium. A spot in a nearby garage comes with it. However, the entrance into it and then the actual parking space is so tight that we both broke out in sweat.  I consider myself an intrepid and consummate driver who adapts to different cars easily, but we were afraid of doing damage to this super duper piece of German engineering which we couldn't afford ourselves. To tell the truth, we couldn’t get into that slot at all – until we noticed a mechanical device that moved the other cars which were densely parked there around on tracks! Duh!

So we are only a 5minute walk away from all the shops, post office and…beer gardens. Not to forget a formidable Gelateria!  That’s the beauty of living in a smaller town, or maybe a German town: You don’t really need a car. Public transport is excellent. For our weekly shopping, however, we trek to a big store by car. We did one excursion down the Rhine by car and yesterday I made it into the big city of Bonn to meet up with my son—18 km away! More about that next...

To be honest, we do miss a few things: an ice-maker, a drier and our garbage disposal. I never knew how dependent you become on these things. Parking close to the house is another one.Especially in winter!