North Rhineland Roadtrip

Hamburg
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Hamburg is the second largest city in Germany. We were quite surprised when we got here. It's very industrial. got more bridges here than Venice and Amsterdam combined. All the large and small canals carved around the Elbe river. So many containers and so many cranes. It's said they can load a container in mere 2 minutes. Several floating shipyards as well. The wealthiests have their yachts or cruises built in Germany. You won't see many old buildings here as they were destroyed in wars and fires in the past centuries. Not a very touristy city; however, they got very good Asian (Thai and Vietnamese) foods here. Better than NYC and Amsterdam .

Bremen
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Bremen is a nice historical town. Lotsa buildings from the Hanseatic times (around the 14th~15th century). Very artsy as well, with many interesting statues. Most famous is the one with the Bremen Musicians. Nice scenery around the river banks. We visited the Ubersee Museum. It's a nice museum with lotsa displays. Most of the explanations are in German so it was a bit hard to understand "why" some of the stuff is there. There seems to be no central theme for the museum, just random collections of very nice stuff. It's like walking inside an encyclopedia. Really helps if you know what you're looking at (or walking with a Physicist). Again, good Asian foods.

Essen
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We came here for the Internationale Spieltage: SPIEL'13 (the annual boardgame convention). While here we spent several hours at the Ruhr Museum. It's housed in an original coal washing plant. If you think you're here to see some of the coal washing machinery and processes, then you're wrong. Once again, it's like a collection of random nice stuff. Lotsa great fossils, including MANY big and small nautilus and particularly a stripe of molten sandstone fossil that was hit by lightening. This will be a super good field trip for mining engineering or geology professionals. 

Koln (Cologn)
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Koln is a neat historical town along the Rhine. The DOM is the highlight of the city. One of the biggest Gothic Cathedral in the world. So grandeur and beautiful that the Allied forces couldn't bare to bomb it during air raids. The Ludwig Museum got a fine collection of modern arts. The Picasso's here are better than the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. I was amazed by its Andy Warhol's as well. The Rhine river bank is a small disappointment though. Not as beautiful as I imagined. We planned to stay 3 nights in Koln; However, the city turned out to be less than we thought and there was the big storm heading our way, so we decided to cut the trip short and drove home on the second afternoon. We were lucky to be unaffected by the storm on the way back. A tree was stroked down and killed 2 people just 10 km off our route.  

Total miles driven: 756