Düsseldorf

Düsseldorf

I left Harste really early on Wednesday morning and arrived in Dusseldorf around noon. Dusseldorf is on the western side of Germany, close to Cologne and the border with the Netherlands and Belgium. It's the capital of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, has a population of 1.5 million and is supposed to be the city with the highest standard of living in Germany. It's really famous for having a good nightlife and amazing modern architecture.

I wasn't really that fussed on Dusseldorf. To me, it feels a lot like Cologne, which I didn't really like, they both have a kind of grey, dreary feel to them, I think its just the old architectural style of that area, the buildings and their rooves are grey or brown, whereas here around Harste buildings are white or pale colours with red or orange rooves. Dusseldorf also seemed full of drunks, homeless and illegal immigrants, and men who yell out at girls wearing skirts. The people there don't seem particularly friendly either. Once I was photographing a balloon and this guy saw what I was doing and walked over and stomped on it, and a couple of times I had to dodge creepy men who were following me around the city centre.

The city centre was, like I said, really similar to Cologne, although here in Dusseldorf you really notice construction going on everywhere, its a growing city. I wandered around through the old town for a bit, which was pretty unremarkable, and up and down the riverfront. There was a huge fair happening over on the opposite river bank but the weather wasn't great so I didn't head over. I did really like the bridges and part of the waterfront area that has these great iron pillars sticking up out of it, I took a lot of photos there. I went up the Rheinturm, their version of the Skytower and had a look around. The weather wasn't really good for that kind of thing, but you could notice some of the amazing architecture from above, and a lot of smokestacks on the horizon (this state is kind of the industrial backbone of Germany).

I visited the Film Museum but was disappointed. It's really basic, with displays on things like explaining the different type of camera shot, something I learnt back in primary school in NZ, and it isn't as interactive as I expected. Finally, I wandered around the old port area, where a lot of the huge modern buildings have been built recently to turn it into a new business district. This was my favourite part of Dusseldorf, they have some amazing buildings there, especially where they have incorporated old parts of the port into a new building.

So around 5pm I gave up on Dusseldorf and headed back to the train station. I was flying out of Weeze airport, another one of Ryanair's middle-of-no-where locations, at 6.30am the following morning and had to sleep out there. I caught the hourly train to Weeze, where with typical german efficiency an hourly bus departs a few minutes later to the airport. However, about 20 of us that got off the train running 3 minutes late discovered that in typical German rigidity the bus had stuck to its schedule and left without us.

57 minutes later it returned and dropped us out at Weeze, which like Frankfurt Hann is a former military base. Because it's so far away from everything there is a hostel out there, but its a weird one, you get the key from the airport and then walk 15 minutes across the abandoned base to one of the barracks, where you let yourself in. All around the hostel are disused barracks with broken windows and doors swinging in the wind, it would make a good horror movie set! I struggled to get much sleep with other people coming and going all night, and then was up at 4am to go to Italy!

More photos are here.