This is the first of ten posts on my recent vacation to the Alps region of Europe, and I will be posting about one per day for the next week. Although my final destination was central Europe, I was fortunate enough to manage to find a flight to Munich with a 7-hour layover in Düsseldorf. I figured it would give me at least a few hours to explore the city, which is only a 20-minute train ride away from the airport. I am really glad I made it to Düsseldorf, though I feel bad that I wasn’t able to spend more time in the city. The city center in itself is fairly small, but I have read that the outskirts of the city as well as surrounding villages also have a lot of important historic sights. Nevertheless, I was able to see some of Düsseldorf. Düsseldorf sits on the Rhine River, an important trade route in Western Germany and Easter France for hundreds of years. The river flows all the way from the Swiss Alps until it joins the North Sea in the Netherlands, passing through countless cities involved in trade over the years. It was the first time I had seen the Rhine, and I was very excited about it.
Düsseldorf has a very impressive city park system, and I quite enjoyed strolling through several parks blooming with flowers, each with its own little lake and overly aggressive geese. Düsseldorf also has many interesting churches, most of them fairly new, as the city was bombed heavily by the British Royal Air Force during WWII. The rest of Altstadt (Old City) is mostly restaurants with street-side seating and many blocks of Europe’s finest designer shopping. It didn’t feel forced or overly commercial, like it often does in Eastern Europe. Instead, Düsseldorf’s best shopping district, Könginsalle, felt a lot like Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, except in Düsseldorf it has a moat down the middle. It was just enough to see for one day without feeling overwhelmed, though I do hope to return someday, especially to see some of the surrounding areas and to explore one of Europe’s most fertile river valleys, especially nearby Neander Valley, where in 1856 the very first Neanderthal skeleton known to modern anthropologists was discovered.
