This was a long avenue in Düsseldorf with a canal running down the middle of it, and lined with trees, called Königsallee. There were lots of fancy stores, and some guy let Malachi sit in his McLaren P1.
There were lots of interesting buildings just tucked in amongst all the others.
Malachi liked the owls that formed the capitals of these columns.
I like wandering around in cities, not knowing what you're going to find, and then happening upon a cool building suddenly. We ran into lots of interesting churches in Düsseldorf,
Such a big difference when the sun came out!
What I liked most about this building was the speckled, tiled roof.
Here's a closer look at it.
In Toronto (while Sam was giving a workshop) I got to go up in the CN tower and eat at the revolving restaurant. I thought it was SO COOL, so when we saw that Düsseldorf had a tower and restaurant too, I wanted Sam and Malachi (and Ziggy?) to have that same experience! This tower is called the Rheinturm.
The sunset on the buildings was really beautiful as we walked to the tower.
The view from the observation deck was great. The windows leaned outward so you felt a bit precarious when looking out, but that didn't bother Malachi a bit!
We could see the Ferris Wheel we had ridden earlier
And this building seemed especially designed to look interesting from above.
This restaurant was different than the one I went to in Toronto. In that one, you sat on a platform that revolved slowly around a central shaft. Here,
It made it difficult not to get a blurry picture.
The tower looked pretty at night, too!
One rainy night, we went to an Italian restaurant we found on Yelp. It smelled amazing, but we almost felt like walking out when the waiter brought over a menu and it was THIS:
A handwritten, cursive-ish menu with mostly Italian menu items…in German. It was very daunting. And the restaurant was tiny and no one spoke English. We deciphered what we could, but after ordering we still had basically no idea of what we would actually be getting. It was good, though!:
We walked back to the hotel in the rain.
One of my favorite places in Düsseldorf was a big country house (of the schloss variety) called Schloss Benrath. It was closed for a wedding when we went there, so we didn't go inside and I didn't get quite clear on who lived there (somebody Benrath, I presume?) but it reminded me so much of Sanssouci in Potsdam! So it was probably from the same era as Frederick the Great. [I realize I could look all this up online, and maybe I should, but…well, maybe I just should.] Okay. So it belonged to one of the Electors of Hanover and it is that same era—late 1700's. Now you know.
It was on the outskirts of the city, but not a long way by streetcar. There's a pretty little lake in front of it:
This is the back of the house, but the front is about the same. Very ornate, very symmetrical, very pink.
Ky in a little guardhouse
The best part of going here was seeing the beautiful and extensive grounds! These Baroque noblemen sure liked their extensive grounds (they probably hunted on them?). I loved the way these were arranged—formal and manicured in some areas, and delightfully wild in others. (Though I suppose even the wild parts were carefully cultivated to look that way, with paths curving off into the trees at just the right inviting angle.)
There was something so delicate and…lacy? frothy? about the trees. They were impossibly tall, and the the sprays of leaves on top seemed to display each tiny leaf individually against the sky. I'm not sure how to describe it, or what precisely was different, but it just looked different than a deciduous forest in, say, Oregon or California. You might be able to see it if you click the picture to enlarge. I kept saying to Sam that this type of tree and forest reminded me of some artist's work, but I couldn't think who! Finally he showed me some pictures and we decided it was the Danish artist Peder Mønstad I was thinking of. Look at this, and this, and this! So I guess the forests in Denmark are similar to those in Germany. Maybe I'll get to go there someday and see.
Looking back at the house.
Formal meets wild. The avenues were perfectly straight, so you could always see waaaay back where you'd come from. But there were smaller paths curving off every which way if you wanted to feel like you were discovering your own little secrets.
At the end of the longest avenue, after you went through a circle with paths going off eight ways like spokes in a wheel, you finally reached the end of the grounds (and I'm guessing back in the day, the grounds didn't end there, but continued to the river) and there, across the street, was the Rhine to greet you!
A small canal draining into the river
Tiny tiny Malachi
It was such an unexpected and beautiful forest in the middle of a city. We saw people biking, running, or walking their babies, and I thought how nice it would be to live nearby. You could run here and take a different path through the grounds every day for weeks!
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