Happy New Year From Dusseldorf -
The biggest question for the new year is how to describe Dusseldorf? The best answer is – not easily.
It’s New Years Day evening, which means the end of our one full day in Dusseldorf. It’s on the train in the morning (Thursday) to Mannheim and then Heidelberg and then a rental car trip to the castle in the Black Forest. Keep moving, they might be catching us.
This is my first visit to Germany and Marlene can’t remember her only other visit. In that we have Stahlheber, Schickedanz and Block making up much of our heritage, arriving in Germany has some extra meaning. On my side, the Blocks (my great grandparents) arrived in NYC in 1902, making the trip from Hamburg. My great grandmother often told me of picking potatoes in a field outside Danzig, Germany (now Gdansk, Poland). I’d love to go there just to say I was there, but it’s not geographically logical.
Yesterday (New Years Eve) we left Amsterdam around noon on the German ICE train. A very sleek train, all silver on the outside, but not as comfortable inside as the Dutch train from Paris. You can see the German imprint of simplicity and straight lines. It was a great train, just different. The terrain from Amsterdam to Dusseldorf (it was actually the Amsterdam-to-Frankfurt train that runs every couple of hours) was flat, with stops in some fairly large cities and plenty of smaller communities to see, to say nothing of lots of farms. There were many more single family homes in The Netherlands than in France. The homes have lots of roof – a high peak – so, you’re looking at a full first floor and not much of a second floor due to the roof encroaching into the space. The Dutch homes are all red brick and things were very neat, especially the Dutch farms. That’s not to say that multi-family housing isn’t predominant, it’s just to say there were more single family homes than you see in France. And, the shutters covering windows and the walls and fencing enclosing property that’s in France (especially the south of France), don’t exist in The Netherlands. The bigger cities (there were about four between The Netherlands and Germany on the Amsterdam-to-Dusseldorf journey) tended to be fairly modern, with glass high rises in the downtown areas. When we moved into Germany it seemed a little less neat compared to The Netherlands, but quite neat and organized compared to France. The Netherlands and the small section of Germany we’ve seen, appear much more modern than most of France.
We got off the train in Dusseldorf and were floored by the inside of the train station. It was like a new, sleek shopping mall. Then we went outside and the façade remained from when the station was built in the 1950s (see photos, including a photo looking out from the station at trams and fairly modern buildings across the street). Our hotel, Stage 47, is (like the train station) away from the best parts of central Dusseldorf. The hotel has a theatrical name and theme, with each room named after a “star”. The two photos of the hotel room include the wall visual of the German star our room is named after. A few blocks away is a 6-block stretch of world-quality shopping on one side of the street (see Marlene on New Years Eve with the stores closed) with banks, businesses and a big InterContinental Hotel on the other side, with a stream down the middle. Adjacent is a typical downtown shopping area, all adjacent to Old Town, which is really an entertainment center with clubs and restaurants, though there is some shopping, and that leads right to the waterfront on the Rhine River. The photo of the old building is in Old Town, which with the holiday season features a ferris wheel (every big city seems to have it for the holiday). We went on the big wheel today and got some interesting photos (coming up in part #2).
When we arrived yesterday afternoon the kids wanted to stay in, so Marz and I got on a tram in front of the hotel and rode to the end of the line. Very interesting. I’ll say it again, unless you can really walk, the best way to see a city is on mass transit. Here in Dusseldorf they have about 30 rail transit lines between tram lines and subway lines, which primarily share the same tracks. As themidnight hour drew closer, we actually went to a steak house in Old Town for dinner. The steak was much better than anything tasted in France. I had a beef filet (just to distinguish because a filet mignon over here is pork, while our filet mignon is a filet of beef here). The beef filet was the toughest I’ve ever had and it had a slight “grassy taste”, but it was nice to dig into some beef. The meal came with baked potato (can’t find such a thing in France) and generally was just like a meal you’d see in the U.S. The plan was to go to the banks of the Rhine River and watch the fireworks show atmidnight. Wind and 40 degrees made listening to the fireworks from the hotel room much more appealing.
A few asides: 1) the Stage 47 hotel is next to the Savoy Theatre, which is something less than a classy, big time theatre, and the Savoy had a New Years Even concert that went past 4 am (I’m sure you’ve heard that thumping bass sound that seems to never end).........2) on the train from Amsterdam yesterday we had a couple in the seats in front of us from Central Oregon.....and, 3) today on a subway platform we talked with two au pairs from the U.S., one of them from the Tri-Cities, Washington.
So, what is Dusseldorf like? Marlene asked me how I’d explain the city and I simply told her “not easily”. It’s not like any city we’ve been in. The best point might be this: out of Amsterdam the trip was designed based upon geography and days available to get from Amsterdam to Aix-en Provence. I looked at Dusseldorf and Cologne (Koln), which is not far from here. I saw a photo of Cologne after World War II and all that was left standing was a church steeple. I read that Cologne was a totally modern city, considering everything has been build since 1950. Thus, I decided we’d stop here in Dusseldorf. Well, the Cologne lesson is important, because it’s clear that much of Dusseldorf has been constructed in the last 55 years.
Don’t miss it --- we really liked Amsterdam. And, lots of folks spoke English in Amsterdam, more so than we’ve discovered in our 1-1/2 days in Germany.
More in part #2.
The Wilsons
