Dusseldorf

YES.  Dusseldorf is a fun place.

We had been asked why we chose this city for our first visit to Germany and other than a cheap airfare from our local airport we were at a loss to provide an answer, untill now. 
Did you know, (we read in our hotel's blurb), that Dusseldorf is Germany's centre of fashion AND has the world's longest bar?

That said ,what we have here are pages and pages of blog entry that serve as a diary reminder for Gail and I of our first time in Germany.  You are welcome to follow these photos and pages and although only a small number of the shots we took are included, I give you fair warning, you will get blog lag. 


It is only an hour's flight from Wetherby to Dusseldorf and the airports are close at both ends so this is a very doable trip. 
We arrived early evening and headed direct to the Rhine waterfront.  There were distractions on the way so we did have an interesting time finding our way.

We walked past the closed shops and arcades of a very modern city and arrived at the river to find the world's longest bar which is in fact a row of various bierkellars and restaurants.

You get local alt, pilsner, cocktails and restaurants but all with high tables and stools along the river with benches, tables and chairs set up under awnings behind them.   We found a table under the Aussie flag, I claimed our seat and ordered our beers while Gail went off to point and sign language the ordering of some huge prawns and bread with salad.  Delicious.  We then toddled back to our hotel via the shops , making sure we noted targets for future meals and day time return visits on the way. 

It is worth mentioning that our room was not air-conditioned which, this being the week of a rare heatwave, necessitated sleeping with a fan on and the windows open.  This in turn allowed the duf-doof of a "24 hour stretch Hummer adult party-bus" to wake us at 3am as it parked outside for what seemed like hours ... Ah, the joy of three star hotels.  To be fair, the room rate was great and the service, comfort and food in the place were superb so no complaints, other than the party bus.
The next morning after a wonderful buffet breakfast at the hotel, we headed into town down Koenig Sallee. That is Dus's, the high fashion street, Cartier, Prado, Channel etc, where all the beautiful people are seen to be seen.

  I tell you, there are a lot of pretty girls in a fashion capital.  Models being draped stunningly over landmarks by photographers and almost wearing latest trends.  Regrettably there is also a lot of moneyed mutton dressed as lamb, botoxed, collagen pumped and looking like lipo-sucked alien ducks on heels.. Urk. 
Not to be distracted, we were off to have a strong morning coffee in the square and wait till 10am  for the tourist info office to open and to find how we could book a river trip to Cologne.  No luck as this is not a popular thing to do from Dus.  One tour a month, it left yesterday. We took a trip down river to Kaiserwerth, the 'old town' with a C12 ruin, cobbled streets and lots of  cafe's.  Here are some shots of that day trip. 

  

At the end of our day's walking and eating we headed back by the U79 train to Dus city .  This tram-like thing goes underground into the city centre after a long scenic route along roads and past tempting destinations like the aquazoo and peaceful looking reserves.  Dus has over 20% dedicated to green space so there are lots of parks to explore.  Back in Dus central again we headed off to walk through Hofgarten, Germany's first public garden, created by Nicolas de Pigage in the 1700s.  After resting nicely with a long stroll by the lakes and a bit of a sit, we turned towards our hotel which, we discovered by happenstance and nice fortune, is located in the Japanese quarter of Dusseldorf.  Walking past wondrous smelling purveyors of fine edibles, we couldn't resist the temptation of a bit of Nihoneese grub for our dinner and spent a happy hour or so selecting very good dishes off the moving counter of a busy sushi train restaurant.  Washed down with a couple of Asahi brews the day could not have ended better.

After a much better night's sleep we went across our road to a Japanese bakery, spotted from our window when we were glaring down at the party bus the night before.  We selected five unique, gorgeous and sweet bread buns and twists ordered with two strong coffees and devoured them all while siting on the bakery's little stools by their shop window.  Took us back 20 years to our Tokyo life.

                            Next stop for the reals start of our day was a re-visit to the Tourist info centre in Dus Square to find out how to catch a train to Cologne.  Simple enough as it turned out but details like how to buy tickets and stamp them for the journey and where the train leaves from all went towards making the start of the journey very un-boring.  We eventually plopped ourselves into a first class window seat (behind frosted glass doors) in a empty part of the otherwise packed train.  We were sure the ticket collector would chuck us back out into the sweaty masses of tourists,commuters and trainee mormons when he came by, but no, he chatted to us in mixed english and told to enjoy our day..... Result !

KOLN.

Cologne (Koln) is a fascinating town, if you arrive by river this is the welcoming scene you see at the fishmarkt wharf but we arrived by train and exited to be confronted by a huge church.  Koln is most famous for its cathedral, the DOM,  largest Gothic structure in the world and if you are interested there is enough information published to sink a ship so I'll just gloss over all that by mentioning that the large east window was done by an atheist and is a real bone of contention. The facade is the largest frontage ever built and it is not possible to photograph the whole building.  but here is an attempt with Gail in the foreground.  There is lots of interesting things around the Dom, like the roman tiled mosaic floor discovered when digging an air raid shelter, the workshop where the grotesques and gargoyles are made to replace the ever-deteriorating originals..

and bits of old roman walls and sewers if you are interested in such things. 

But Cologne is more interesting that just the Dom.  It seems every other building has a sculpture hung on it for protection against evil or for other more obscure reasons. The city Town Hall clock has a head (Platzjabbek) that sticks it's tongue out at the ratepayers every hour.  There are tales and legends at every corner, like the one about the wish you should make at the statues of the farmer and the townsman, the Heinzelmannchen fountain showing the tailor's wife who by tricking the elves into showing themselves one evening ensured no elves would ever do any more work for the locals.  All good yarns and they do make for an enjoyable walk of discovery around the town.  Thanks to Karen Downie and her sister who provided us with great walking tour notes for Koln.  I've dropped in some shots of our Cologne adventure day here but we took so many.....This last shot is of the Farina eau de cologne building, the original 4711 smell dating to 1709.  In the days of few baths and no sewers a refreshing scent was a necessary but an expensive treat.  A small bottle of Farina cost then about 6 months salary and the story goes that Napoleon went through about 20 bottles of the stuff a month. 

A day trip to and the walk around Cologne is enough to make a stout horse lame but we are made of sterner stuff, so long as we are well fed and lubricated.   Our return direct to Dusseldorf via a no-stop express train, (using the same ticket and escaping a caution from ticket collector again), was swift and enjoyable, despite the mormons-in-training.  We also decided that as the Dus HBf train station was not far from our hotel we would walk back a different way.  There are, scattered around Dusseldorf a number of life-like statues in incongruous locations atop plinths of which this is one.  It was by the happy chance wandering of streets that we discovered the best and cheapest margaritas we have had anywhere... 3,90euro, tequila and triple-sec, fresh citrus and egg white perfectly shaken and served classic.  We could only do three each as, despite it being happy hour, and my limited capacity for such toxic things, we had other plans for what had already been a rather a big day.  But we vowed to return for more magnificent margaritas at a surprisingly empty but very friendly bar.   

  The night's plans included a change of clothes, a steak dinner and a brazen attempt to crash our way into the Breidenbacher Hof upstairs cigar bar (ein dusseldorfer legende) despite not having anything resembling a coat, tie or for that matter decent shoes.  We walked past the posh entrance every time we went to and from the city and had once been invited to enter by a rather elite hatted doorman as we peered thru the burnished glass.  But as we were in shorts and sandals, sweaty and smelly we read his invite as crazy german humour given the gowns and smart attire of beautiful people arriving in long black limos.
 

I don't know if it helped or not that on this night we were caught in a tropical style downpour and we turned up in the swank foyer dripping like drowned rats, but we were welcomed with genuine (or well practiced) delight, ushered past the zebra skin bar chairs and into the dimly lit, leather upholstered, wood lined smoking room. Gail was fawned over by classy waiters and thoroughly enjoyed her first cigar bar experience.  I satisfied myself with a fine single malt while the lady chose a champagne based cocktail that hinted at citrus, chili, berry and a waft of spices.  The menu showed it was made up of so many ingredients the waiter had to assure her that yes, they were all in it, not listed as choice of some exquisite torture.. 

We were gifted a plate of fine (70%) pure chocolate, a wanker stand of nuts (our Manchester cracker trend has reached global status) and some of the most spectacular wasabe dipped crunchy thingies we have ever tasted. 

A beautiful experience which we enjoyed to it's fullest before heading out to try and remember where our steak dinner restaurant was.  The steak meal when we eventually found the Bock House was okay but we are still in search of a good steak, ones like we think we remember eating all the time in Oz.  But the meal was a fine end to what could only be called a rather full day.

BENRATH

Up bright and shiny for our next day we scoffed some more scrumptious Japanese baked goods and coffee from our favourite and closest baker and headed off by local U74 train to BenratH palace and it's forest/garden. http://www.schloss-benrath.de/ (WARNING- this website locks you in and you'll have to re-enter the blog . Look at it later)  If you can't be imaging what exploring over 61 hectares of planned garden and forest feels like I hope the attached shots give you some sense of it.  We spent the most delightful day wandering the paths, forests and gardens as well as touring through the palace and its wing houses which contain natural history and garden design museums.     Now you might think that walking for an entire day and sucking up kultcha with every breath would tucker you out.  And you'd be right.  It was only a short U74 train ride, about 40 minutes, back to our newly favourite margarita-serving happy-hour-offering smiling waitress.  But not too many margaritas now, well, okay just one more, the do get more delicious don't they? Can't stay too long though because we decided that we would head back into the city to share a paella for dinner , yes, we had previously discovered the Spanish quarter of town.  As luck would have it the weather was remaining fine, warm and tempting us to stroll there via the riverside.  Did I mention Dusseldorf has the world's longest bar?  It's right on the river.  At the start of the bar there is a cocktail house.   It serves mixed drinks out of the back of a fire truck at which we hardly stopped for any time at all before continuing our walk along the river and towards our dinner destination.  The paella was okay and had lots of huge prawns, big mussels, fresh fish and was as good an example as we have ever not been able to finish.  We both decided that paella was not a hot weather dish and we may well have ordered our last.  An added bonus to the decision to eat in the spanish quarter was the recorded-orchestra tenor who performed for the street.  A good humoured chap he grabbed any mobile phone in use by passers-by and sang a solo to the person on the other end, when he tired of that lark he abducted girls walking one way and dragged them, while crooning sweet opera to them, back the way they had come.  Most entertaining and thankfully he only performed for about 20 minutes allowing us to return to our quiet enjoyment. Our night passed smoothly as we discussed plans for tomorrow and found ourselves walking back through Koenig Salleeagain on our way home.

 Up again bright and early for our final day we grabbed some more baked goods and headed to the river for some strong coffee and to watch the morning drift by.  Dusseldorf has a dockside commercial zone at Hafen/Unterbilk which is known for it's unusual and quirky architecture.  We thought a days walk around there would be a worthwhile and local end to our Dus stay as we had decided a two hour train ride to the Moselle and Rhine junction, while beautiful, would be best served by a whole other short break. The walk towards Hafen took us past the area where locals compete in acrobatics, a skill for which the youth of the city have been renown for centuries and who now perform on weekend evenings to the delight of the tourists.  The water level in the harbour when we arrived was rather low but it can be seen how high the level gets in flood by the marina posts in this shot.  I will post two shots of just some of the buildings but a visit is mandatory if you have any interest in architecture and design. I recommend you click on the photos to see the detail of these buildings.  They give just a taste of the variety around this large area.  We spent a great chunk of the day walking the streets there, sat under umbrellas for a few beers, and had a delightful salad lunch on the harbour front in what would have to be one of the most OTT restaurants... Gail tells stories about the decor of the ladies loo, the gents was clean and smart but no hanging wall art....the main dining area was dripping in crystal lights, blingy surfaces and generally had you wallowing in opulence.  We sat outside. 

Reluctantly we left the harbour and walked back to the city.  The way was made pleasant by an avenue of trees which stretches for the mile or so between these two parts of the city. 

And that is really about all that we did on our first visit for a few days in Germany.  We did like the experience as tourists, we enjoyed the food and the ices and we will return to the country again.  Yes, lots of the locals do speak English, not "nearly everyone' as we had been told, and almost none of the menus nor any public transport had english but this is not such a problem, makes it more of an adventure really.

The cab ride to the airport was quick and easy, the flight just a bit longer and we were soon back and as snuggled in our Wetherby bed as these little fellas. .........