Neuss - At The Doorsetp Of Dusseldorf

Managing to hang around 14 hours in a train to reach Neuss: Luckily I haven’t got too many of these long train rides, I mean that those are okay even that they start to be a bit exhausting at certain point. At Neuss Nina was waiting me at the station to drive me up at her place. The story with Nina is actually same than story with Alex (Blogpost Stuttgart), we met on ESN Tampere trip to Russia in 2010. On my interrail two years ago I also planned to visit Nina but at that time everything was just overlapping and days were simply too short to find a time on my trip so It was four years ago when we met last time. Excited!

Neuss is quite unknown place, it is a pretty little town which is located between Dusseldorf and Cologne having good S-Bahn connections on both. Also the day I arrived there happened luckily bee a good one with sunshine because Saturday (at least morning hours) seemed to be just raining. We decided to enjoy that and packed up picnic things heading up to the river  A great moment of relaxing after my long train ride, I have to confess that I think that I even fell asleep for short moment. The river is actually the border of Neuss and Dusseldorf and quite busy one what comes to boat-cargo ship delivering something somewhere. And on the backround there was Dusseldorf’s TV tower, which was actually also possible to see Nina’s and Martin’s flat window.

 

After warming up in sun we went to take a look at the city, having idea of enjoying ice cream… The real summer delicacy. Central plaza was filled up with cafeterias and restaurants where people were sitting and chatting, spending the lazy Sunday. Unfortunately we weren’t that lucky with the weather anymore because quite soon after we had got our ice cream portions it started to rain… first only dew drops but quite soon like pouring water from the sky. People, including us, started to move around quickly like ants at work trying to fit themselves under umbrellas or find a place somewhere else, under arches etc. more or less successfully. We manage to survive quite dry (or at least in my opinion) from the rain.

At the evening there was something new as dinner thoughts. If it wouldn’t have been raining we would have gone to near park to have a bbq but obviously because of the rain it wasn’t possible, but the idea itself was good so it just needed to be modified little bit. Indoor bbq, a completely new try out which actually worked. We used kind of a table grill, placed it under the window (Nina & Martin lived luckily at top floor) and grill master Martin started to grill, few things at one time… It actually worked, we didn’t burn the house down, flat didn’t start to smell like a bbq and the food was delicious. My personal favorite date palms wrapped in bacon. What was good about this home bbq, after feeling completely stuffed the way into a bed was short, just to fell in there and have some sleep.