February 15: A Walk in the Park

9:00, we arise and start our first full day in Europe together! After a breakfast of bread, cheese, coffee and cold cuts we began planning the day. We decided on going to a place that was recommended to me by Julia at work, Kaiserswerth. Kaiserswerth is a small village on the coast of the Rhine filled with pathways, cafes, culture and an old castle.

Kate, Eric and I headed to the internet café first so that Kate could contact the family back in T-dot. It turned out that the café did not open until 13:00 so we decided to take a tram into town to avoid waiting. After a brief and hilarious attempt by Kate and Eric to make change for train fair, we were off.

The tram is nice because you can see the city while you scoot around town. The tram passed through a forest, gardens and by neat little German houses. The tram arrived at the main train station. Kate scurried off to Starbucks to procure a Düsseldorf mug, because she thought that it is a funny sounding city name, they were out unfortunately and she ended up with a Germany mug.

Another tram and we were in Kaiserswerth. By this point it was 13:00 and we were hungary. We sat down at a café and I swallowed a portion of my pride as I lay down the German menu and flipped though the English one. The waitress did not know the English word “carbonated” when Kate was ordering water so she kindly performed a little carbonation dance to get the point across. We got soup and drinks. The food came and it was quite delicious. After lunch we walked along the Rhine and checked out the old castle in Kaiserswerth.

We got home and a great curry dinner led quite nicely into an early bedtime, we had to get up at 3:45 to catch the plane to Paris.