North Rhine – Westphalia Jan 18-21 2019
Münster (from the Greek “monastery”) (pop 300,000, 61,500 students) is in the northern part of the state and is considered to be the cultural centre of the Westphalia region. Today it is known as the bicycle capital of Germany.
History. Dating from the late 8th century, it was a leading member of the Hanseatic League in the Middle Ages. In 1534, the Anabaptist rebellion occured here – they claimed all property, burned all books except the Bible, and called it the “New Jerusalem”. John of Leiden believed he would lead the elect from Münster to capture the entire world and purify it of evil with the sword in preparation for the Second Coming of Christ and the beginning of the Millennium. They went so far as to require all citizens to be naked as preparation for the Second Coming. However, the town was recaptured in 1535; the Anabaptists were tortured to death, their corpses were exhibited in metal baskets (often confused with cages), which can still be seen hanging from the tower of St Lambert’s Church.
Part of the signing of the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 that ended the Thirty Years War was held in Münster guarantying the future of the prince-bishop and the diocese; the area was to be exclusively Roman Catholic.
The University of Münster (today called “Westphalian Wilhelms-University”, WWU) was established in 1780. It is now a major European centre for excellence in education and research with large faculties in the arts, humanities, theology, sciences, business and law. WW II. In the 1940s, the Bishop of Münster was one of the most prominent critics of the Nazi government. In retaliation, Münster was heavily garrisoned during World War II, and five large complexes of barracks are still a feature of the city. Münster was bombed on 25 October 1944 by 34 diverted B-24 bombers and 91% of the Old City and 63% of the entire city was destroyed. In the 1950s the Old City was rebuilt to match its pre-war state
In 2004, Münster won an honourable distinction: the LivCom-Award for the most livable city in the world with a population between 200,000 and 750,000. Münster is famous and liked for its bicycle friendliness and for the student character of the city.
The city’s built-up area is quite extensive. There are no skyscrapers and few high-rise buildings but very many detached houses and mansions.
Climate. The perception of Münster as a rain-laden city isn’t caused by the absolute amount of rainfall but by the above-average number of rainy days with relatively small amounts of rainfall. The average temperature is 9.4 °C (48.9 °F) with approximately 1500 sun hours per year. Consequently, Münster is in the bottom fifth in comparison with other German cities. The winter in Münster is fairly mild and snowfall is unusual.
Schloss Nordkirchen is a palace in Nordkirchen between Munster and Dortmund. The schloss was largely built between 1703 and 1734 and is known as the “Versailles of Westphalia” since it is the largest of the fully or partly moated Wasserschlösser in that region. It was originally one of the residences of the Prince-Bishopric of Münster.
In 1959, the schloss was purchased by the State of Nordrhein-Westfalen and has since been a state-run college specializing in the training of future tax inspectors. Parts of the interior of the schloss are open to the public, as is the surrounding park. Inside the schloss, an up-market restaurant offering Westphalian cuisine looks out into the large formal garden that faces the northern façade of the schloss. The schlosschapel may be rented for weddings.
The schloss stands on a rectangular island surrounded by a broad moat-like canal. The island’s four corners are accentuated by four small free-standing pavilions. The garden gives onto a landscaped park of 170 hectares, both with many life size marble statues.
DORTMUND (pop 601,402), the third largest city of Germany’s most populous federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia after Cologne and Düsseldorf, and Germany’s eighth largest city. It is the largest city (by area and population) of the Ruhr, Germany’s largest urban area with some 5.1 million (2011) inhabitants, as well as the largest city of Westphalia. On the Emscher and Ruhr rivers (tributaries of the Rhine). it was founded in 882, it was the “chief city” of the Rhine, Westphalia, the Netherlands Circle of the Hanseatic League and became one of Germany’s most important coal, steel and beer centres. Dortmund consequently was one of the most heavily bombed cities in Germany during World War II. The devastating bombing raids of 12 March 1945 destroyed 98% of buildings in the inner city center. These bombing raids, with more than 1,110 aircraft, hold the record to a single target in World War II.
The region has adapted since the collapse of its century-long steel and coal industries and shifted to high-technology biomedical technology, micro systems technology and also services.
Dortmund is home to many cultural and educational institutions with over 49,000 students. Nearly half the municipal territory consists of waterways, woodland, agriculture and green spaces with spacious parks, in a stark contrast with nearly a hundred years of extensive coal mining and steel milling in the past. Dortmund is home to Ballspielverein Borussia 09 e.V. Dortmund, commonly known as Borussia Dortmund, a successful club in German football.
Dortmund Hauptbahnhof (Hbf or Central Train Station). Originally built in 1847, it was replaced in 1910, then one of the largest stations in Germany, but was destroyed in an Allied air raid on 6 October 1944. The main station hall was rebuilt in 1952 in a contemporary style. Its stained glass windows feature then-common professions of Dortmund. The station has over 600 departing trains on a typical weekday.
German Football Museum. I don’t enjoy watching football nor the museums that recount the history of the game from the first game – tons of team jerseys.
LWL Industrial Museum. The pit head tower at Hannover Colliery stands out like a medieval fortress in north Bochum. The steam hauling engine, built in 1893 is the oldest extant example of its type. From the Malakoff tower, the colliers would travel 750 metres down to bring the coal. In 1973 the Hannover Colliery, the last working mine in Bochum, closed its operations for ever. It is closed December-March. Free
Museum Ostwall. This contemporary art museum is on the 4th and 5th floors of Dortmunder U, a renovated 1927 brewery “skyscraper” once owned by the Union Brewing Company, then the largest in Germany. I actually enjoyed this with lots of interesting pieces. Free
BOCHUM/HERNE/BOTTROP/RECKLINGSHAUSEN
Botanical Garden of Ruhr University. Maintained by the Ruhr University Bochum, it was opened in 1971, with later developments: tropical house, 1976; desert house, 1988; Chinese garden, 1990; savannah houses, 2000.is open daily without charge.
The outdoors area is organized into geobotanical regions, including forest, coasts, meadows, prairies and marshes from the Americas, Asia, and Europe. It also contains an alpine garden and succulent garden. Its Chinese garden (1986-1990) using skilled gardeners donated by Tongji University in Shanghai as a sign of friendship in the southern Chinese style. A pond covers half its area. The garden’s greenhouses include a tropical house, desert house, savannah houses and alpine house.
ESSEN (pop 590,000). It is the central and second largest city of the Ruhr, the largest urban area in Germany, the ninth largest city of Germany, as well as the fourth largest city of the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Founded around 845, Essen remained a small town until industrialization. The city then — especially through the Krupp family iron works — became one of Germany’s most important coal and steel centres. Heavy industries declined in the last decades of the 20th century. Essen is one of the largest urban areas in Europe comprising eleven independent cities and four districts with some 5.3 million inhabitants. It is 21 km from north to south and 17 km from west to east.
WWII. Tens of thousands of forced labourers worked in the 350 Nazi Essen camps. As a major industrial centre, Essen was a target for allied bombing, the RAF dropped a total of 36,429 tons of bombs on the city in over 270 air raids destroying 90% of the centre and 60% of the suburbs.
Although no weaponry is produced in Essen any more, old industrial enterprises such as ThyssenKrupp and RWE remain large employers in the city. Foundations such as the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Stiftung still promote the well-being of the city, for example by supporting a hospital and donating €55,000,000 for a new building for the Museum Folkwang, one of the Ruhr area’s major art museums.
Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex in Essen is a large former industrial site inscribed into the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites in 2001, and is one of the anchor points of the European Route of Industrial Heritage.
The first coal mine on the premises was founded in 1847, and mining occurred from 1851-1986. For decades, starting in the late 1950s, the two parts of the site, Zollverein Coal Mine and Zollverein Coking Plant (erected 1957−1961, closed 1993), ranked among the largest of their kinds in Europe. Shaft 12, built in the New Objectivity style, was opened in 1932 and is considered an architectural and technical masterpiece, earning it a reputation as the “most beautiful coal mine in the world”.
A totally new twelfth shaft designed as a central mining facility was opened in 1932, it had a daily output of up to 12,000 tons, combining the output of the four other existing facilities with 11 shafts. It had a simple, functional Bauhaus design with its mainly cubical buildings made of reinforced concrete and steel trusses. The shaft’s characteristic Doppelbock winding tower in the following years not only became the archetype of many later central mining facilities but also became a symbol of German heavy industry.
Red Dot Design Centre. The Red Dot Design Award is an international product design and communication design prize awarded by the Design Zentrum Nordrhein Westfalen in Essen. There are prize categories for product design, design agencies, and design concepts in several fields of manufacturing, including furniture, home appliances, machines, cars and tools. Designers and producers can apply for the prizes with the winners being presented in an annual ceremony. Winning products are presented in the Red Dot Design Museum on the premises of the historical Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex in Essen, built in 1997. A second was built in Singapore in 2005 and in 2013, the Red Dot Design Museum Taipei was opened. The Red Dot Design Award had more than 15,500 submissions from 70 countries in 2014. The competition focuses on young, up-and-coming creative talents, designers and design companies around the world.
The main exhibit was Design in the Age of Big Data.
Essen Hauptbahnhof is south of the old town centre. It suffered extensive damage in World War II and was almost completely rebuilt in the 1950s and 1960s. Some 400 trains pass through the station each day, making Essen Hauptbahnhof the third busiest railway station in the Ruhr Area after Dortmund and Duisburg.
Museum Folkwang. This is the premier art gallery in Essen exhibiting many masterpieces included 4 Van Goghs, many impressionists and several Rhodins. Free
Gruda Park & Botanical Garden. The botanical attractions include the Alpinum, the Westphalian Farmer’s Garden, the Rose Garden, the Shrubbery, the Conifer Collection, the Asia Section and the Heath Section.
OBERHAUSEN. On the river Emscher between Duisburg and Essen, it was formed in 1862 following inflow of people for the local coal mines and steel mills. The Ruhrchemie AG synthetic oil plant was a bombing target. In 1973 Thyssen employed 14,000 people in Oberhausen in the steel industry, but ten years later the number had fallen to 6,000.
Gasometer Oberhausen is a former gas holder that has been converted into an exhibition space. The Gasometer is an industrial landmark, and an anchor point of the European Route of Industrial Heritage.
It was built in the 1920s, and reconstructed after World War II. In the 1920s the coal and steel industry produced blast furnace gas and coal gas as a by-product of iron production and coking, while the steel industry as well as coking used large amounts these gasses or alternative fuels. As supply and demand of gas varied independently, sometimes excess gas had to be flared off, while at other times additional fuel had to be purchased. The Gasometer was built as a buffer: storing excess gas and releasing it again when demand exceeded production. It had a maximum capacity of 347,000m³, a height of 117.5m and diameter of 67.6m.
In later years many coking plants and iron works closed, reducing supply as well as demand for the gas stored and natural gas became cheaper. The Gasometer decommissioned in 1988. In 1992 the city council acquired the building and converted it to an exhibition space. The former pressure disc was fixed at 4.5m height, with a 3000m² exhibition space on the ground floor below. The main exhibition space, on top of the pressure disc, was fitted with a stage and seating for 500 people. Lifts and stairs were fitted to provide visitors access to the roof. The third level has images projected onto the ceiling viewed from seats surrounding the centre or with a mirror on the floor.
Large exhibits change about once per year. The present was photography of mountains and was excellent. €7 reduced
DUISBURG (pop 500,000). At the confluence of the Rhine and the Ruhr, in medieval times, it was a member of the powerful Hanseatic League, and later became a major centre of iron, steel and chemicals. For this reason, it was heavily bombed in World War II. Today it boasts the world’s largest inland port, with 21 docks and 40 kilometres of wharf. The city supports a large Turkish community.
Lehmbruck Museum (Center for International Sculpture). Sculptures by Wilhelm Lehmbruck (1881- 1919 by suicide. ) are on one side and a substantial number of works by other 20th-century sculptors on the other. This is complemented by paintings by 19th- and 20th-century German artists.€9
DÜSSELDORF (pop 613,000) is the capital and second-largest city of the most populous North Rhine-Westphalia after Cologne, as well as the seventh-largest city in Germany. At the confluence of the Rhine and its tributary Düssel, the city lies in the centre of both the Rhine-Ruhr and the Rhineland Metropolitan Regions with the Cologne/Bonn urban area to its south and the Ruhr to its north. “Dorf” meaning “village” in German, the “-dorf” suffix is unusual for a settlement of Düsseldorf’s size.
It ranked as the sixth most livable city in the world. Düsseldorf Airport is Germany’s third-busiest airport after Frankfurt and Munich. Düsseldorf is an international business and financial centre, renowned for its fashion and trade fairs, and is headquarters to one Fortune Global 500 and two DAX companies. Messe Düsseldorf organises nearly one fifth of premier trade shows.
Kunst Palast. The exhibit was sports cars – Drive by Design – 1950-70s with all the classic cars as they premiered. €9
Kunsthalle Düsseldorf is an exhibition hall for contemporary art built in 1967 using recast concrete. Hosting an array of exhibitions, but without its own collection, new talents and “big” names will continue to find their place in this out-of-the-ordinary venue. €9
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen is the art collection of the German Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia founded in 1961 that has earned an international reputation as a museum for the art of the 20th century. The building at Grabbeplatz (K20), with its characteristic black granite façade, was inaugurated in 1986.
With major works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Piet Mondrian, among others, as well as a wide-ranging ensemble of circa 100 drawings and paintings by Paul Klee, the permanent collection of the Kunstsammlung offers a singular perspective of classical modernism. The collection of postwar American art includes works by Jackson Pollock and Frank Stella and by pop artists Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol. Free
Film Museum. An interesting museum with many special effects exhibits. Free on Mondays and after 5pm.
AACHEN (pop 250,000) is the westernmost city in Germany, located near the borders with Belgium and the Netherlands, 61 km west south west of Cologne in a former coal-mining areaa. It developed from a Roman settlement and spa, subsequently becoming the preferred medieval Imperial residence of Charlemagne, and, from 936 to 1531, the place where 31 Holy Roman Emperors were crowned Kings of the Germans. Aachen. One of Germany’s leading institutes of higher education in technology, the RWTH Aachen University is located in the city. Aachen’s industries include science, engineering and information technology. Aachen is at the western end of the Benrath line that divides High German to the south from the rest of the West Germanic speech area to the north. Aachen’s local dialect is called Öcher Platt and belongs to the Ripuarian language.
Aachen Cathedral (traditionally called in English the Cathedral of Aix-la-Chapelle), is Roman Catholic and one of the oldest cathedrals in Europe and was constructed by order of the emperor Charlemagne, who was buried there after his death in 814. For 595 years, from 936 to 1531, the Palatine Chapel, heart of the cathedral, was the church of coronation for thirty-one German kings and twelve queens.
The span and height of Charlemagne’s Palatine chapel was unsurpassed north of the Alps for over two hundred years. It suffered a large amount of damage in a Viking raid in 881, and was restored in 983. After Frederick Barbarossa canonized Charlemagne, in 1165, the chapel became a draw for pilgrims on a par with Rome, Jerusalem and Santiago. During WWII, the cathedral’s basic structure survived.
In 1978, Aachen Cathedral was one of the first 12 items to be listed on the UNESCO list of world heritage sites.
The Palatine chapel has a diameter of 14.46 metres and the metre-high railing of Carolingian bronze rails were cast 1200 years ago in a single piece according to Roman models. The original cupola mosaic was probably executed around 800 and known from Medieval sources depicted Christ as the triumphant lord of the world, surrounded by the symbols of the Four Evangelists, with the twenty-four elders from the Apocalypse of John offering their crowns to him.
The Gothic choir has more than 1,000m² of glass conceived as a glass reliquary for the holy relics of Aachen and for the body of Charlemagne in a gold shrine. Follow the excellent brochure to see all the treasures in the church. The mosaics that cover everywhere in the church are spectacular.
Couven Museum. In the old part of Aachen, the only building Jakob Couvens, that had survived the Second World War and was restored to its original state with the rooms were furnished.
Ludwig Forum for International Art. Top works of Pop-Art, important works of Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol or Ai Weiwei; Peter and Irene Ludwig have brought together an incomparable collection of American and European art since the beginning of the 1960s. The collection comprises more than 3000 artworks – from artists like Keith Haring, Duane Hanson, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Richard Hamilton, Jeff Koons, Neo Rauch, Nam June Paik, Jenny Holzer and many more.
MONSCHAU. is a small resort town in the hills of the North Eifel, within the Hohes Venn – Eifel Nature Park in the narrow valley of the Rur river. The historic town center has many preserved half-timbered houses and narrow streets have remained nearly unchanged for 300 years, making the town a popular tourist attraction. Historically, the main industry of the town was cloth-mills. It is UNESCO WHS listed.
During World War II the town of Monschau, sitting on a vital road network, was a point of great tactical importance in the opening phase of the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 as the northernmost point of the battlefront.
The former important Vennbahn,which was assigned to Belgium by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, was used until 2001 as a Heritage railway, had stations in Monschau, Konzen and Kaltenherberg, now it is closed. It was remodeled 2010 for the establishment of the Vennbahn (bike path ). The medieval town is traversed by the river Rur and is dominated by slate panelled and Tudor style houses with cafes, restaurants, craft and souvenir shops.
This was a significant drive out of the way. The border area of Belgium/Germany is very hilly. Ascend high into the hills (snow present and about 4°C colder than down below) and then descend on a very narrow cobble street down into the valley. The streets are not made for driving. I stopped to look into the church and an wind orchestra of 21 was conducting a concert. I stayed for about half. The church is interesting with the altar in the centre of the long wall and the pews arranged around it in a semi-circle.
Rotes Haus (Red House) is a former headquarters of the Scheibler entrepreneurial family and is now accessible as a museum, which presents in particular the bourgeois living culture at the turn of the 18th to 19th centuries. The large patrician house was probably built between 1752 and 1768 by cloth manufacturer Johann Heinrich Scheibler . Because of its facade colour it is called Red House .
It was both residential and central commercial building of the cloth publishing dynasty Scheibler. It previously replaced existing factory buildings on the property. The building consists of two halves: The residential building (left) bears the name “Zum goldenen Helm”, the right half (“Zum Pelikan”) was used as an office building and production facility. A helmet and a pelican are shown above the entrance doors. The massive building with three main floors, two gabled floors and the loft used as storage stands at the mouth of the Laufenbach in the Rur. Compared to the surrounding, much lower half-timbered houses, the Red House at the time of construction worked unusually powerful and monumental. It is called a kind of “early skyscraper”.
The brick façade was highly unusual in the half-timbered Monschau. In the spacious mansard roof, the valuable wool was stored. She came through a shaft into the cellar, where it was washed and dyed. In the 1830s, a water wheel was installed rurseitig to drive machines for roughing and shearing the woolen cloth, but hardly used because of legal disputes and usually low water level.
The builder Johann Heinrich Scheibler (1705-1765) initially produced monochrome, piece-dyed cloth, then with patterned fabrics. He then began to dye the finest Spanish merino wool before further processing and to process it into various patterned fabrics with bright, almost garish colours. €6
Düren is a town between Aachen and Cologne on the river Rur. The main sites are: Burgau Castle (Schloss Burgau), Dicker Turm (“Fat Tower”), a remain of the old city’s fortifications, Annakirche (St. Anne Church), Marienkirche (St. Mary Magdalene Church), Monument to Bismarck and the Leopold Hoesch Museum (contemporary art).
On the drive here from Moncshau, I passed a gigantic hole in the ground, a open=pit coal mine. Tagebau Hambach mine soft brown lignite coal, or “braunkohle,” for its equally massive coal-fired power plant that is visible on the horizon. The scale of the Hambach pit is mind-boggling, on par with the giant strip mines and mountaintop removal operations in the US, and startling amidst the otherwise lush green farm fields and forests. It’s about 33 square miles wide and 438 feet deep and produces almost 100 million of tons of coal a year. Three hundred-feet-tall “diggers” or “baggers” stationed throughout the pit scrape the crumbly golden earth and the damp, dark seams of coal onto conveyor belts. The four brown coal pits that RWE Power owns in this region of northwest Germany have expanded across the landscape like a creeping fungus, consuming forests, fields, towns, roads and even a river along the way. In most cases the mine’s expansion goes smoothly for the company, aided by a long-standing “Mountain Law” that basically gives mines eminent domain-type rights to seize land and compensate landowners.
Coal mining has a long history in this part of Germany. People here dug up coal to burn for heat and cooking as far back as Roman times. In the 1800s and 1900s, coal fueled massive industrial growth in North-Rhine Westphalia. It helped build the steel and weapons empire of the Krupp family, which supplied Hitler with artillery and still exists today as the multi-national ThyssenKrupp. Most of the mines tapping deep seams of “hard coal” or “stone coal” (the type commonly found in the US) have closed in past decades since it is much cheaper to import such coal from places like Russia, Poland, Colombia, and South Africa. But mining the shallow lignite brown coal is relatively cheap. Brown coal looks more like petrified wood than what most people think of as coal. Since it is moist and heavy, it can only be economically transported short distances and is hence burned in power plants near the mine sites. Brown coal also burns dirtier than “hard coal,” meaning that the farmers in this area and the residents of nearby towns such as Lamersdorf and Sindorf and cities like Duren and Cologne are exposed to significant levels of fine particulate matter and other air pollutants.
The plants also emit high levels of carbon dioxide, an irony since Germany has gained much acclaim for its aggressive adoption of renewable wind and solar energy. Wind turbines can be seen in every direction beyond the brown coal pits; solar panels are installed on many farmhouse roofs around the mines, and there is even a large county-owned solar farm right outside the RWE coal plant near Duren. But given the reliance on dirty brown coal – which in 2011 provided a quarter of the country’s electricity – the widespread adoption of renewables as nearly meaningless if the country continues to expand its overall energy consumption and get a significant portion of it from brown coal.
Germany’s few remaining hard coal mines will close by 2018 when crucial government subsidies end, but brown coal mines are scheduled to operate through 2045. Part of the reason for Germany’s continued reliance on coal, particularly brown coal, is the country’s popular decision to close all nuclear plants by 2022. The country needs other types of power to fill the energy gap created by doing away with nuclear power. There is still not enough renewable energy available and generating power from natural gas in Europe (unlike in the US) is more expensive than coal.
NOMAD MANIA RHINE WESTPHALIA
World Heritage Sites:
Carolingian Westwork and Civitas Corvey
Castles of Augustusburg and Falkenlust at Brühl
Cologne Cathedral
Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex in Essen
Sights:
Externsteine, Teutoburg Forest
Freudenberg, Westphalia. The “Alter Flecken” is Freudenberg’s downtown core, built wholly of half-timbered houses. It gives the impression of a small town from the 17th century and is a “Building monument of international importance”. The Evangelical church, after Freudenberg got its own parish in 1585, was built as a “fortress church” but the belltower is the only one of the former castle’s towers still left standing.
The church in Oberholzklau was built early in the 13th century and is worth seeing as a Romanesque church whose architecture nevertheless plainly shows transition to Gothic. The rectory next door, built in half-timbered style, is from 1608.
Monschau.
XL:
Elten and Tuddern (formerly Netherlands). At the end of WW II, plans were made in the Netherlands to annex German territory as compensation for the damages caused by the war. The Dutch state wanted 25 billion guilders but reparations would not be given in monetary form. In its most ambitious form, this plan included the cities of Cologne, Aachen, Münster and Osnabrück, and would have enlarged the country’s European area by 30 to 50 percent. The local population had to be either deported, or, when still speaking the original Low German dialects, Dutchified. The plan was largely dropped after U.S. dismissal of it. Eventually, an area of a total size of 69 km2 was allocated to the Netherlands. Almost all of this was returned to West Germany in 1963 after Germany paid the Netherlands 280 million German marks.
Many Germans living in the Netherlands were declared “enemy subjects” after World War II ended and put into an internment camp and 3,691 Germans were ultimately deported.
Vennbahn region German exclaves in Belgium. The Vennbahn is a former railway line that was built partly across what was then German territory by the Prussian state railways. It is now entirely in Belgium, because the trackbed of the line, as well as the stations and other installations, were made provisional Belgian territory in 1919 (permanent in 1922) under an article of the Treaty of Versailles. This had the effect of creating six small exclaves of Germany on the line’s western side, of which five remain. The treaty (not the location of the trackbed, per se) also created one small Belgian counter-enclave, a traffic island inside a three-way German road intersection near Fringshaus. The route is now a cycle way.
Railway, Metro, Funiculars, Cable Cars:
ICE 3 Routes
Thalys Routes
Wuppertal Suspension Railway (Schwebebahn)
Castles, Palaces, Forts:
Brühl: Augustusburg Palace
Nordkirchen: Nordkirchen Palace
Religious Temples: Höxter: Corvey Abbey
Modern Architecture: Buildings and Monuments: Karl Junker House, Lemgo
Caves: Atta Cave
Villages and Small Towns:
Assinghausen
Monschau. Museum Rotes Haus, Site.
European Cities:
Düren
Gelsenkirchen
Hagen/Iserlohn
Hamm
Krefeld
Leverkusen
Mönchengladbach
Mülheim an der Ruhr. Aquarius Water Museum
Münster
Oberhausen. Entertainment/Things to do: Gasometer
Paderborn
Siegen
AACHEN
World Heritage Site: Aachen Cathedral
Museums:
Couven Museum
Ludwig Forum for International Art
Religious Temples: Aachen Cathedral
Entertainment/Things to do:
Paintballpark Aachen
BIELFELD/GUTERSLOH
Entertainment/Things to do:
Bielefeld Farmhouse Museum
Dr. Oetker World
BOCHUM/HERNE/BOTTROP/RECKLINGSHAUSEN
Railway, Metro, Funiculars, Cable Cars: Bochum-Gelsenkirchener Straßenbahn
Planetariums: Planetarium Bochum
Botanical Gardens: Botanical Garden of Ruhr University
BONN
Museums
Alexander Koenig Research Museum
Arithmeum Bundeskunsthalle
Deutsches Museum
Kunst und Ausstellunghalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland
COLOGNE
World Heritage Sites: Cologne Cathedral
Railways, Metros: Cologne Cable Car Cologne Hbf Cologne/Bonn Trams
Museums
Decorative Arts Museum
EL-DE Haus
Fragrance Museum
German Sports and Olympic Museum
Imhoff-Schokoladenmuseum
Kolumba
Museum for East Asian Art
Museum Ludwig
Museum of the Cologne Carnival
Mustard Museum
National Socialism Documentation Center
Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum
Roman-Germanic Museum
Schnütgen Museum
Wallraf-Richartz Museum
Religious Temples:
Cologne Cathedral
Cologne Central Mosque
Entertainment/Things to do:
Daniel Buchholz,
Cologne Giga Center
DORTMUND/LUNEN
Dortmund Hbf
Museums:
German Football Museum
LWL Industrial Museum
Museum Ostwall
DUISBURG
Duisburg Stadtbahn
Lehmbruck Museum
DUSSELDORF/NEUSS/RATINGEN
Railways: Dusseldorf Hbf Düsseldorf Rheinbahn
Museums:
Film Museum
Goethe Museum
Hetjens Museum
Kunsthalle
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen Museum Kunstpalast
Castles, Palaces, Forts: Schloss Benrath
Things to Do: The Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus
ESSEN
World Heritage Sites: Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex in Essen
Essen Hbf
Museums:
Museum Folkwang
Red Dot Design Museum
Grugapark Botanical Garden
WUPPERTAL/SOLINGEN/REMSCHEID
Entertainment/Things to do: Wuppertal: Waldfrieden Sculpture Park
Theater der Welt (Theatre of the World)
Xanten: Schwerter, Brot und Spiele
I am back slumming at McDonalds – the only consistently reliable wi-fi in Europe (plus bathroom, garbage disposal, sleeping place and water source). Each country’s McDonalds has a “deal” – in Germany it is the 1€ sundaes and small coffees (in the UK it is 1£ McFlurries). Otherwise the food is grossly overpriced. A surprising number don’t have electrical plugs. As I write this, I am at one south of Dortmund and it is packed with 20 somethings at 11:30 at night.
