Eurotrip, Day One - London to Münster

The first day of the trip started roughly at the crack of dawn. We decided to take an early plane ride to Dusseldorf via Ryan air for the cost of 1 pound. However, this meant that we had to get up at 5am so that we could catch a nite bus to Liverpool station to catch a train to Stansted airport to get on the Ryan Air flight. Having been very careful about packing the previous night we did not need to check any baggage and borded out plane with ease. The plane was about half full so we had our pick of seats and chose the emergency exit isle seats for maximum comfort.

The ride on the plane was only about an hour long, so we were barely at cruising altitude for twenty minutes before we began the descent. The airport that we landed in was Dussledorf Airport and while we expected to be able to get off the plane and see the city, this was certainly not the case. It turned out that we were in fact in the middle of absolutely nowhere. We had to catch a bus into Dussledorf (for a whopping 15 Euro!) which was approximatly just over an hour long. Once in Dussledorf though we had some time to walk around and enjoy the scenery.

I think that we must have caught Dussledorf at a bad time. We walked around the city, but there really wasn't much to see. athere were a number of shopping malls, but just a kind of boring downtown. There were two interesting parts though, there was a market where I bought a meatball (simply a ball of cooked ground meat) which came topped with two inches of mustard, and the Rienne river, which was okay to look at. After eating my ball of meat, I felt guilty for eating all of that meat and nothing nutrious, so I bought two peaches at the local food market.

After enjoying the town, we walked back to the train station, filled out our Erurail passes and had them validated at the station. Next we went to a ticket kiosk and found the train that would take us to our first real stop, Münster. The train only took about an hour and when we got into the station, my friend Thore was waiting to meet us already.

The three of us walked through the city as our tour guide (Thore) showed us all of the landmarks which we could use to investigate the next day. He also took us through the University of Münster and we saw the main campus building which was a castle. I'm not really sure why it was called a castle though, as it seemed more like a really large mansion type of lecture hall (I think its a North American thing to assume that all castles are from the days of Knights and Round Tables). Finally we walked up to Thore's flat which was about 10 - 15 minutes up the road.

Happy to be in a place where we could jettison our bags (which had become awful heavy) we relaxed and thought about our next steps. Eventually we decided to make some Fijtas and went off to the market to get some supplies.

While getting the supplies, Thore took some time to educate me about the beers that we should try. We bought some that were national, regional and local brews. They were all pretty good, but the best on was called Jever. I'm not sure if you can find this one in Canada, but it is worth buying one bottle if you can.

After shopping we made our dinner, and stayed up a while after chatting and sharing bits of our cultures back and forth, via youtube. At just before midnight though we were sufficiently exhausted and headed to bed.