Römisches-Germanisches Museum (and some slightly lower-brow diversions)

We took advantage of this month's Goethe Institute trip to get cheap train tickets to Köln. Instead of taking the tour again, we went to the Römisches-Germanisches Museum. This was our 5th museum in as many weeks, and we are starting to feel the museum fatigue. Actually, I'm starting to feel it and Tyler pretty much can't handle it anymore. When we were counting the museums he wanted to include churches in the count, too. I can visit churches all day long, but Tyler is not as gung-ho. (In case you're interested, the first four museums were: Beethovenhaus, House of German History, Kunst (Art) Museum Bonn, and the Arithmeum, a museum that primarily displays calculating machines, which is more interesting than it sounds. You might also count the displays housed in the fortress at the BUGA, which would bring the museum total to 6.)

The Römisches-Germanisches Museum has a very nice collection, including this amazing Roman mosaic.



The mosaic (which was the floor of a banquet room in a Roman villa) was discovered in the 1940s during the digging of bomb shelter. The museum was built around the mosaic. One of the central figures is Dionysus, Greek god of wine; others are his attendant nymphs and things. Here are some detail shots.







This is a Roman funeral monument, also found in Köln.



And here's another huge mosaic, this one depicting seven wise men of ancient Greece. It was discovered in 1844.



I particularly enjoyed the jewelry displays.



This is a gorgon mask. Notice the freaky snake head sticking out of her hair.



After the museum we hid from the pouring rain in a little pizza place that turned out to be quite good. Naturally, we also stopped by Merzenich for a Nougat Brezel.

Speaking of pizza, we spent half a day a couple of Fridays ago on a quest for pizza. We had spent the morning searching for apartments, and after making two calls in German each we were drained and starving. So Tyler found a website called pizza.de and we set out across town to try the reputed best pizza in Bonn. It's called Pizza Mann, and it took us about an hour to get there by bus and foot. We had a pizza with bacon, creme fraiche, large chunks of potato, and ridiculous quantities of cheese. It was immensely satisfying.

This past Friday we undertook another food-driven journey: we took the train to the Haribo factory store in Bad Godesberg. It was roughly the size of a grocery store, and was filled with people (mostly adults) buying boxes and boxes of fruchtgummi. We bought several different varieties ourselves, but I felt positively restrained by comparison with most of the other shoppers.



Our haul: cherry-cola bottles, black currant-flavored German flags, chocolate-covered marshmallows, some sour chewy things, extra-sour pugs, and ginger-lemon gummies. The things I've tried so far have been tasty, but I feel a little sick every time I think of our shelf stuffed with fruchtgummi.