“You must go to to Dusseldorf.” During a decade or so of living in the Netherlands, no one ever said this to me.
Probably it has never been said to anyone. Even back in the Renaissance or Middle Ages or Dark Ages or whenever it was proto-Saxon-ites began to gather around these river towns and mill towns and trading towns “Skip it and go to Cologne” may have been common advice.
That is one thought to have as you tour D-Dorf during an hour-plus layover while on your way to the Czech Republic.
Of course, it is categorically unfair to judge any place by what you can see in a short walk starting from its main train station. Transportation hubs often, as you know, keep the domestic at a distance and invite the transactional. And such judgment is especially unfair by comparison to Amsterdam where, so long as you do not go down the Damrak (and even then) you need only go a few hundred meters to escape Central Station’s business and land in as much beauty as you will find anywhere in the world. And despite the concentration of tourists you find there you will still be hard-pressed not to see kids at play, families in action, and patrons greeting owners as neighbors. These are just the fantastic realities of life any city might cultivate, whether or not the area around its train station suggests it is a tourist hot spot or a super-duper place to live.
Neither of which downtown Dusseldorf does. Though I made it to te Rhine, traversed a few narrow streets of pubs and cafes now engineered for drinking and football watching, and walked on avenues where rich people shop (two Rolex stores within a few blocks), you would not confuse any of this for the fantasy land of Amsterdam. Less vibe, fewer smiles, bigger buildings (more people sleeping in their alcoves), no hand-made signs at the storefronts, and not one school or playground making itself conspicuous via the skipping kids or confluence of prams.
But then again, Amsterdam did not have the shit bombed out of it during the war.
In fact, visiting from Mars, the yawnish capitalist architecture and street layout here reveal almost no history at all. Every once in a while you catch site of beautiful brick or carved stone that offers a glimpse of what may have been a place of signature, a place the proto-Saxons would have endorsed or wanted to sack and pillage. Now, like lots of places, it could be anywhere.
Yet, I’d prefer not to cast aspersions. Likely the great parts of Dusseldorf are elsewhere or even if they are not, so what? People are still walking and jogging and biking and out with dogs. No obvious sign they need to be special nor flag what is wrong with life (excepting those sleeping underneath the mini sky-scrapers, of course.) Under the weight of tourism and money and specialness, Amsterdam tilts more and more towards nowhere too such that—who knows?— the ordinariness of Dusseldorf may be what more of us need.
Anyway, so long as there are no more bombs.
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Footnotes of a kind:
1) The picture is of the locker I put my bag in at Dusseldorf HBF. This I took so I would not forget the number.
2) At the crowded kiosk/store in the early morning in Amsterdam at Centraal Station you can get a latte, cappuccino, double-shot, etc. The barista-ing of the world now complete (nothing save technology sweeps over us like style) you can even get a discount if you have your own mug, a slightly absurd offer from a place catering exclusively to people in rush or from out of town. And yet, this is exactly why it should be standard. We need systems that force us to be good even when we are busy or lost. You should, that is, be given your coffee in a mug that you can drop off on your train or when you get to Dusseldorf, some Google-there to ensure you get your deposit back.
3) If you think people respect the “quiet car” on international trains more than they do on Dutch commuter trains you are incorrect. While I know murdering someone for talking on the phone or watching videos under a “shhh” sign would be bad form I nevertheless wonder what is required to make the point.
4) While train travel is generally romantic and awesome, and while the scandal of how much cheaper it is to fly across Europe rather than ride the rails deserves Davos-level attention, it can also be a first-world nightmare.
The train from Nuremberg to Cheb, for instance, is like twelve cars long, only the last two of which go to the aforementioned Cheb. This causes much confusion among the non-locals, all of whom need to get to C-town as their connection point to Prague. (Before I go there I am headed to a small, supposedly restful place called Karlovy-Vary.)
So overcrowded are these two cars that standing room only is in full effect not only in the cars themselves but in the ante space that connects them, which is where I find myself. A space meant for zero and able to accommodate eight is now stuffed with twenty-seven who will make the nearly two-hour ride just as you would on a packed subway train.
As “‘wifey’”—I know this is her name because one of her tattoos says so and, I cannot stress this enough “wifey” is spelled with the quotation marks—talks in loud American-ease about buying a dress in Munich and how much she just loves Croatia, a small dog offers a shrill “brark” with water torture regularity. Even distractions like one of the bros “Wifey” is traveling with proclaiming “It’s a good thing I took a shit before we left” (no argument there), it is not long before you hear, “Brark, brark . . . brark,” just as you would, “Kill me. Kill me. Kill . . . “
Now, being stuck on the tarmac is a first-world nightmare too. And there the foreignness of the environment along with the disparity between how fast you should be going and your powerlessness to do anything more than just sit pulls on nerves that never could have fired for your great grandparents.
Compared to the plane, the Auschwitz car between Nuremberg and Cheb includes physical suffering—heat, standing, airlessness—but at least you and your people are on the move. On a plane, you just want to be going. On a train like this any there you might get to will do. The folks who packed Jews into trains before offering them a death shower were homicidial geniuses of one age, those who fly planes into buildings another. There’s not much poetry in that, I guess, except to say that a genius for homicide lives in the race, even and especially among those who just default to carpet bombing cities. And, anyway, as I was sweating it out and drafting this in my head and wondering how many of the tourist crowd headed to Prague I was packed in with had ever read Kafka’s “In The Penal Colony,” that’s what I was thinking about.
Brark.
6) Nuremberg, in a quick ten-minute tour on my layover there, looks more inviting in a tourist way than does D-Dorf, but the amenities of its train station are indistinguishable from those in Amsterdam or Düsseldorf and lots of other such places today. At these hubs and destinations, you will invariably see flocks of kids with backpacks on their euro-adventure and older folks in teched-up clothes on theirs, such conspicuous tourists mixing in with the locals and commuters in spaces that announce themselves as euro-port/malls. If you can’t yet depart with a mug full of coffee, spots to make change or get something passable to eat are in abundance, as are world brands selling their wares. Need a book in the local language or in English? No problem. Need people to help you find your train or security or places to leave your luggage? All are close at hand. But try to find a water fountain you can use to fill your water bottle and you are shit out of luck.
This, by the way, is a fact of pressing import that puts your principles about refusing to pay €2.50 for a plastic bottle to the test when you are headed to Cheb bone-dry, forced to overhear the blurts and overwriting internally.
To wit: Talking to some of the English speakers (wifey and crew, an Aussie girl, a Brit) jammed in along with me and the dog is a young local girl with a strong accent and any number of piercings (her father is a tattoo artist, she says) who also reveals herself as half Polish. This is true of the Aussie too and at some point, Wifey, whose intonations are, as I said, uniquely American, reveals her background as Iranian.
Thus, to overwrite it, even with this holocaust aesthetic as our foreground, everyone is one. And yet the bombs.
The local girl offers up a bottle of water to her half-polish sister and from this I fetch a life-saving, principle-restoring swallow.
7) At the transfer in Cheb the “Wifey/bro crowd rushes to get their train to Prague and I learn that Karlov-Vary, which I have been saying to myself as “KaLoaV Very” is closer to “Calav-ie Vaar-ay.” More on there, however you say it, tomorrow.