Düsseldorf, Why Did We Bother?

Hindsight is always 20/20, and in hindsight, we should have just skipped Düsseldorf, Germany!  Paul had added it to our itinerary after reading somewhere that it was a nice city and the “fashion capital” of Germany, but neither of us found it particularly worth seeing.  The coolest thing we saw was the door knocker in the picture above and in total we only took 15 pictures today!

We arrived yesterday, after a little over 3 hours of train travel from Hamburg.  We had booked to stay at another Ibis hotel because it’s right by the train station, which is usually right in the center of town, but in Düsseldorf the city center is actually about 1 km away from the train station and the area by the hotel is rather isolated with no restaurants or shops really close by.  This is kind of a pain because in the evenings we only have time to grab a quick bite since Paul can’t be too far from his computer/Internet during working hours, so after arriving we didn’t do much apart from getting some food.

Today we started by heading to Königsallee, Düsseldorf’s “most famous thoroughfare” according to Lonely Planet.  It didn’t look like anything I hadn’t seen before and I started experiencing random sharp pains in my right hip (maybe we’ve been on our feet too much this trip?) so our pace got progressively slower as we walked. By lunchtime I wasn’t in the mood to continue walking so we did a short loop around the historic center, stopped into the Church of St. Lambertus, then started looking for somewhere to eat lunch. 

As we walked closer and closer to the hotel, we couldn’t agree on something to eat and ended up at a Persian restaurant halfway between the hotel and city center, fearing we wouldn’t see anymore restaurants if we continued to go closer to the hotel.  Although the rice was better than the rice that came with the Persian food we had in Munich, the koobideh in Munich was much tastier.  Still, we were happy with the food we got and it was probably the best option available to us!

Perhaps my opinion of Düsseldorf is skewed by the fact that our hotel wasn’t in a great location and my hip started hurting for unknown reasons today, but I don’t think I would recommend a visit to Düsseldorf, even though it’s ranked to have the highest quality of life in Germany.  The people weren’t as friendly as the Hamburgers, the buildings not as impressive as Berlin or Munich, and the food selection didn’t seem as good either.  Considering how far we had to travel to make this two day stop, in hindsight I would have just said “let’s skip it!”