As it was promised in my last post, here is report on our weekend trip to Dusseldorf. Few things that I would like to note before I start talking about the trip itself:
- I am still not the best walker with my left let misbehaving
- We came only for a weekend, which is a short period of time, and the primary aim was to see our friends, enjoy food and beer, so not much site-seeing
First of all, huge thanks go to Jenya and Dave for making our time really cool. Starting from Dusseldorf Hbf, through-out the whole time we were in Germany, to Dusseldorf Hbf to catch our train back. Lots fun, hospitality, beer and really nice time.
The trip started Saturday morning from Diemen Zuid station of Amsterdam, intercity train to Utrecht Centraal, change to ICE train all way to Dusseldorf Hbf. The whole thing took us only two and a half hours, which is really fast. While intercity trains travel at around 140 km/h, ICE can go around 300.
As we arrived to Dusseldorf Hbf, Jenya met us at the station and we started to their place, to leave our stuff there, have a few beers and decide on what are we doing later.
The place where guys live is a kind of a student hostel, but not the one you would normally see on a TV. There are a lot of different geeks, lots of things all over, paintings on the wall and so on. So the place is a museum by itself :-) All people are nice and friendly, all drink alcohol and smoke all sort of things.
After some time and few beers there, we moved out to see couple of places in the city. Nice architecture, a whole street of graphity paintings and so. All accomplished by friendly chat, beer (ofcourse) and lots of pictures. Few hours of walk made us hungry, so we decided to visit a brewery. What I can say: it is just perfect. Everything is really cheep, portions are big, food is high quality, beer is amazing (especially Alt sort of beer they do there) and all is pretty simple. I enjoyed a pork knee, while rest of us had some schnitzels, beef, fish and whatsoever.
Later in the evening we got back to a street with lots of graphity, which was already crowded with some punks, geeks, and other interesting people. Few beers with live rock music, nice atmosphere and chatting. Get pretty tired and went back to our friends home, where we continued until we felt asleep.
Another note about bed: as architecture of the building where hostel is located has very high ceiling in the design, but not very big rooms, the bed is constructed as a second layer (floor) above the door, which saves a lot of space and separates place for sleep from sofa and table with a beer on the floor. We really enjoyed a night on that bed as it was really something new, sleeping right under the ceiling with a nice view through a big window! We even thought that when we will have our own house and kids, we should do something like that for the kids :)
Next morning (around 11AM), we woke up, gathered for coffee and after breakfast left for picnic, as it was really nice weather. Few hours on the grass by the river, with beer and sandwiches made a nice beginning of a day for us. After we had enough of sun, we came back home to pack our stuff and take it with us, as we were planning to visit some beer place and then go to the train directly.
This day we decided to have food at a place which has an “all you can eat” option (for just something like 9 euro/person). Few hours enjoying lots of different food, beers, cocktails and intensive conversation did a nice finish to our journey to Dusseldorf. By 20:30 we were back to central station of Dusseldorf, where we got on ICE train and did all the way back to Amsterdam.
Anyhow, as I am not a good writer, you’d better check out my last two sets of pics in Flickr here and here, as well as my and Yana’s instagrids.
Really noticeable things about Dusseldorf itself:
- Food is really cheap (compared to Amsterdam and Cyprus) and is of great quality and variety
- Beer is all over and is cheap as well. If some breweries they would bring you beer without asking unless you put a round carton thingy on top your glass.
- Metro stations all look the same inside, so the only way to differ one from another is a plate with the station name.
- Nice unfolding stairs in the tram exits
- Very nice architecture
- A lot of old people (especially compared to Amsterdam, where the majority of people are pretty young)
So that’s all that came into my morning mind about our trip to Germany. If something else will pop-up, i will either add a new post or just comment here.
Update: Yana wrote a post (in Russian) on the same subj (from her point of view) in her blog here