Back in the Fatherland

June 21

Amsterdam really is a wonderful city, so clean and perfectly working. Seems like I spent hours last night riding around on the trams, watching the sights slide by. Even though it was the weekend I forgot to prepare, high season and hotels were mostly booked last night but I found space just around the corner in the Tourist Inn 'Budget' Hotel, very nice in comparison to the Brian, flat-screen TV but non-free internet in the lobby, plus more variety at breakfast.

This morning via Metro to the Amstel Station and the Eurolines bus, the lost-cost alternate now to Continental train travel. Our pair of drivers chattered away in Russian during the four-hour drive to Düsseldorf, which was interupted at the border for a security check. I thought this was a thing of the past in Schengenland (but there was a notice in the bus station about long delays at the Italian frontier...) I spotted the border, which had a pullout like a rest area with several official vehicles parked, but as the highway traffic just continued on I thought it was going to be ignored like on the train: no stopping, no checks, no nothing. But instead, a moment later, the bus pulled into an actual rest area right behind a parked police car, from which two border guards emerged wearing the familar gray Grenzpolizei uniforms (but these were both young women). They seemed to be giving someone in the back a lot of attention (this bus's final destination: Croatia), and they even asked to look inside my backpack. The first time ever, for me, entering Deutschland. Achtung, baby.

Now I'm ensconced in das Hotel Rheingold which is too expensive but great because I have a little back porch with a view out onto a triangular courtyard. In the nearby Telesurf internet cafe, I'm inhaling too much second-hand smoke (welcome to Europe) made even more annoying by the one-sided chatter of a couple of Sype callers. Earlier I was exploring the Japanese stores along the Immermannstraße -- did you know one of the biggest expatriate communities from that country calls Düsseldorf home?

All the residents are all watching the big game again tonight and German flags are flying everywhere here, along with a few gutsy Turks. They even have pairs of 'em mounted on their cars, their shafts protruding like insect antennae, just like the patriotic yahoos do back home.

Kind of a rip off; being here for less than 48 hours -- so often cold wintry or rainy autumnal are the weathers I experience when visiting Düsseldorf, but now in the warm sunnyness my presence is all too brief. I return to this town again and again 'cause I like its semi-newness: flattened in the war, it's all no more'n sixty years old. Tomorrow, back to Mainz, a more traditional place (very close to the Frankfurt aerodrome), home of Gutenburg, where I broke my leg stumbling off a curb on a last day of my 2004 visit to Eastern Europe.