Few diplomats have a good word to say about Bonn, a city with as much excitement as a small seaside town in December. Yet, as the German government prepares to move to Berlin in 1999, many in Bonn's international community are curiously reluctant to leave.
During the next three years, more than 50 government institutions and 10,000 jobs will move from Bonn to Berlin. The new capital boasts dozens of lavishly funded theatres, concert halls and museums, acres of park, woodland and lakes in the city centre and some of Europe's best nightlife.
But, instead of leaping at the chance to exchange the numbing dullness of Bonn for all these delights, civil servants are demanding thousands of pounds in compensation.
Housing presents the biggest problem, with many officials reluctant to leave their vast, silent Bonn villas for a noisy flat in Berlin. The federal government has reserved for top officials some of the best houses vacated by the British, American, French and Russian forces in 1994.
Foreign diplomats have been scouring city records to locate property their countries may have owned before the second World War. Thus, the new British embassy will be on the site of its pre-war predecessor near the Brandenburg Gate, next door to the French.
Ireland's pre-war embassy was in a rented building, so the Department of Foreign Affairs has been obliged to go house hunting. The Department's architect was in Berlin during the summer to look at potential sites, both for the embassy itself and for the ambassador's residence.
Unlike many of his counterparts, the Irish ambassador is likely to come up in the world when he moves to Berlin. Officials are taking a keen interest in a vast, turn-of-the-century villa in the Grunewald, a posh suburb in the west of the city. The Department of Finance will make the final decision on whether to buy or rent the house, which is valued at about £2 million.
The embassy itself, which currently occupies a floor of a drab office building in Bonn, will probably move to the site of a former communist party building in eastern Berlin. The Belgians, who owned the site before the second World War, planned to share a chancellery building with Luxembourg and the Netherlands. When the Dutch pulled out of the plan, Ireland was invited to take their place.
The present building on Jaegerstrasse, which Irish officials say was once used by the East German Stasi secret police, will be demolished to make way for the new embassy. Each mission would be self-contained within the building but they would share some facilities, including a large conference room suitable for press conferences.
The new embassy will not be completed before the end of the century and, in the meantime, the Irish delegation will rent offices in Berlin's city centre.
Irish officials are fairly cheerful about moving to Berlin but other diplomats view the change with trepidation. The papal nuncio, for example, is facing the upsetting prospect of exchanging the vast palace he now occupies in Bonn for a modest, suburban mansion in Berlin.
The people of Bonn, fearful that their city will become more of a ghost town than ever once the government leaves, mounted a robust campaign to stop the move. But most have now given up the fight and the leader of the campaign has himself just opened a bar in the new capital.
The Chancellor, Dr Helmut Kohl, was in Berlin recently to lay the foundation stone for the new chancellor's office, which is due to be opened in 1999. Dr Kohl has taken a close interest in the design of the new building and is clearly confident that he will be occupying it.
But even Dr Kohl, the architect of German unity, is a little nervous of the rough and tumble of life in Berlin. He has ordered a ring of steel to be thrown around the entire government complex and has banned demonstrations near his office.
The chancellor has even ordered the eviction of a group of ageing hippies occupying a village of tents next door to his new office. He objects to the noise from rock concerts held there and has instructed Berlin's city government to make sure the tents are gone before he moves to the capital.
But, as unemployment in Germany remains at record levels and the chancellor's allies bicker among themselves, many Berliners are confident that Dr Kohl is one new neighbour they will not have to welcome.
