Travelog for: Crush

We enjoyed the view on the way back.
Former police headquaters


The Starlight Express musical theatre

On the Autobahn

Fields between the cities of the Ruhrgebiet





A mailbox

A newsstand with soccer magazines

The budgies completely destroyed their old toy, so we as toyvoyagers were tasked with getting creative and making new ones for them. Here's the pack we bought yesterday:

This is what we got to work with:

The budgies love leather and aren't allowed any fibers.



Do you like it?

We went to the famer's market in Rüttenscheid again. There are farmer's markets in many parts of the city, but we like the one in Rüttenscheid best because it had the largets choice of fresh vegetables, fruit and cheese.
We had to park quite some way away because many people think the same.

We're still here and because TravelingTuffy likes to try out the candy of the world, out host unpacked some. Of course we other tvs were there at once and had to try some, too.
We started out with some swiss chocolate with 70% cacao, our host's current favourite. Jelle's favourite, too.



Personally, I prefered the sweeter kind. Here's a Butterkeks (butter cookie):
They come as regulars, whole wheat, with or without choclate cover and sometimes, as in this case, with a yoghurt cream. Yummy!

Swiss chocolate also come in variations, of course. Napolitains are small pieces, individually wrapped and often come in packs of different kinds:
Zartbitter/dark chocolate, Haselnuss/hazlenut, Milchschokolade/milk chocolate, and giandor(or a variation - a kind of chocolate/nut cream)


Here's Brause. It bubbles and prickles on the tongue. Ahoi is a favourite kind of that sweet here and these little bears come in coke, strawberry, banana or peach flavour.

There's also powder to dissolve in water, big chunks or other small forms with different flavours.

Maoam is another favourite brand. It's chewy candy in all kinds of forms now, regular or extra sour flavours (which should be "sauer" in German, but for some reason it says "sour" on the wrapper).


No list of favourite brands of candy would be complete without Haribo. Here we have their licorice mix, called Matador, but licorice is Lakritz in German.

There's salt licorice or other kinds in there. Here's the favourite licorice snail: Lakritzschnecke. It can be eaten like this or be unwound, or even separated into halfs before eating.

I'm stuffed!
I think I ate 10x my weight in candy today.

This Sunday there was a German-Dutch "Tuchmarkt" (cloth market) in werden. It was very busy and nearly impossible wo find parking in the whole town and even a long way out the roads leading to it.
The actual market wasn't that big but there were other small attraction and food booths and it was generally very busy.

She was basking in all the attention she was getting.
These calves were very cute, along with some black und white spotted lambs, little chicks and fluffy rabbits.

Here are some of the older houses:

We visited Cologne and this is me in front of Cologne cathedral. It's a UNESCO World Heritage site. The towers are 157 m high. Many visitors try to count the steps when going up but usually mess it up at some point. Officially there are 533 but when walking up one might thin they've missed a few (thousand). There's space intended for 4000 people inside. You can find more information via the link. It's a constant contruction site, never really without a visible scaffolding or something smilar. Nevertheless it was quite impressive and it's in the heart of the city at the banks of the Rhine. We walked around and looked a some shops.

Our real reason to visit Cologne was the exhibit of Tutanchamun's tomb. Jelle, Philbert, Knopf and I had a good time. It's kind of a modern multimedia installation to simulate the discovery of the tomb and give an idea of the historical context, both of Tutanchamun's death and of the discovery of his tomb by Howard Carter. They only showed replicas of the original finds but added some photos and copies of drawings etc. from the original dig.

After a general introduction, there were some short films and audio information before being led by the audio guide (pretending to be Carter) into the simulation of the tomb as it was originally found.
Here's my view into the entrance chamber as he must have found it when looking through the first hole in the walled up entrance.


Here's a model of the grave. Above it was the grave on Ramses V. Carter already dug there 5 years before he actually found the tomb and had to stop so as not to make the other tomb, a main tourist attraction, inaccessible. He also stopped when he found some od worker' huts because he didn't think anything would be  found under them. He only went back to them in the last dig he could finance, when he had already tried all other parts of the Valley of the Kings. You see the depression were the worker' huts were, the steps leading down, which were finally discovered during the last dig, the first walle dup entrace, the corridor leading to the 2nd walled up entrance, the entrance chamber, an additional side chamber behond that, and a wall with the burial chamber behind it and an entrance to the treasure chamber beyond that.


Here's one of the walls of the burial chamber. The murals depict the pharaos ascencion as a god and the next pharao as a priest (with leopard skin).


The famous mask was much in demand, so we couln't get a really good picture or one with me in it.


This is a copy of Carter's original drawings to document how the amulets and pectorals were distributed on the corpse:


There were many stylized but very detailed statues of gods and of the pharao in various poses, for example hunting.

the different parts of furniture were explained and the small scarcophagus that held his mumified daughters who dies as infants.

In the end there was some more information about the scandal involving rowdy toursists that cost Carter his career in Egypt, as well as how he was seen by most archeologists of the time, claiming he wasn't a real scientist. He was originally hired to document the archeologists' work by making detailed drawing, ome of which were shwon. No matter their claim, I was fascinated by the pain-staking detail and the indexing apparent in his work at this site. Dissembling the whole grave took a long time because everything was conserved on site before transport and it must have been hard to carefully extract some items, seeing how they were stacked in the tomb.

It's St. Nikolaus day today. On the evening before, children but their boots, or special plates outside their doors and in the morning, they see what St. Nikolaus hs brought them. Traditionally it's nuts and oranges and chocolate. Some small presents are also common. Our host's grandma told us of a time, when oranges were a real luxury and very few people could afford them, or had the connections to get any. They weren't sold at the supermarket. (There weren't any supermarkets...) More common were apples and cookies.

Schools, Kindergarten hospitals and some big companies have special festivities, were either a person dressed like what we know as Santa Claus, or as the actual St. Nikolaus, a bishop,  comes with his servant, Knecht Ruprecht, who deals out punishment to children who were bad, while the good ones get the presents. It can be quite scary for the little ones.

Some photos from our long walk along the river Ruhr:



Hello there!

This is one of our hosts footsteps. I get carried, no way am I digging around in this.

Unless it's to play, of course.
Some geese stay here all year round, but some also come from further up north to spend the winter months here. I wonder if this is what they expected when they booked their camping spot in the South at the beach.

The sun is there, somewhere...




There are several ol factories along the way.




I'm not good a reading prints but this looks like a bird to me. Whatever was ist doing?



Pretty reflections in the water.




Some men made holes into the ice and were fishing.



And now everything with some pop-art color:

Most of the snow melted and now we only have a little bit left. But it's still enough to play and to decorate the landscape.

Here I am in front of the Old Synagogue, it became a museum in 1960.

Hi there! Sorry for the pictures, we had to rely on the cell phone because my host's camera broke.
This is the so called "Stadttor" (city gate) of Düsseldorf:

On this nice and sunny day, we rested along the Rhine to catch a few rays and tried to get the tv tower in a picture with us.

No success. And the media harbor, but the light came fromt he wrong direction:

Anyway, it'S really ncie here this afternoon. A lot of people are out on their bicycles or on foot and watch the ships go by. There are the strangest things on them, whole houses or ship loads of new big trucks.


We found this old loading crane here:


These are the funny buildings of the media harbor:

And I got the tower after all:

We went to Schellenberg forest, a many beech forest in the city of Essen. Lots of people were walkign ther dogs or going for a walk or a ride on their bikes here.



It was quite cold. Luckily there are lots of hills in this area. We climbed on to get warm.

The rangers are very active here. But they also leave a lot of the cut off branches or older dying trees around for different animals and other parts of the natural eco-system. See these great mushrooms?

Here's a restaurant in an old house. This is a very expensive neighborhood.

This is Schellenberg Castle.



Unfortunately we aren't in the picture because we could not stop to take pictures and couldn't be held because someone insisted on gathering all sorts of branches and we and our host's left arm, were sqeezed in under hazle, beech, chestnut and, most importantly, magnolia.

This is the former "Ständehaus" in Düsseldorf, meaning it was the state parliamentfrom about 1880 until 1988.
Now it's the K21, the modern art museum of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
The internal architecture has been changed to make room for big exhibits that through the big glass roof it gets a lot of natural light.