The Asian capital of Europe: Düsseldorf. Experience my journey in this blog, will you read along?
First posted in Dutch on October 23 2023 and updated on October 9 2024.
An old friend of mine asked me if I would like to go away for a long weekend together. I immediately thought that would be super fun, but where would we go? She had never been to Berlin, but since it would only be for a weekend and I had passed the point of being a tourist in that city (I lived there in 2021-2022), we decided to go to another city. My friend is from Belgium and I am from the Netherlands, so we wanted to do something that was in the middle for both of us in terms of travel distance and that is Germany. We looked at different cities, but in the end we decided to go to Düsseldorf. Since we both love Asian culture that you can find in the city, and funny enough we both study Korean.
I started the journey two days earlier, first I went to the estate I used to work at and the next day I stayed in a luxury hotel in Arnhem. On Friday I travelled to the capital of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. From the Netherlands you can get there quite easily by train. Although there is a chance of many delays and I definitely suffered from that. So did my friend. But after a short wait we met each other at the station. Step 1: Get a juice for energy. Step 2: Buy tickets for public transport. Outside opposite the station on the city centre side, you can find the travel agency, where you can buy various tickets. It took us a while to find and wait, but at least we could catch up. Only at the end of the afternoon we could check into our Airbnb, so we decided to walk into town with suitcases and all to sit at the Korean COCO Café.
Without realising it, we walked into Little Tokyo. The city has the largest Japanese community in Europe. You can even find an international Japanese school and Japanese daycares! About four streets are completely dedicated to Japanese and other Asian countries, but Asian culture can be found in various places in Düsseldorf. In this blog post I will not go into the culture or history, which is very fascinating, because otherwise it will become far too long. Anyway, this is the city if you want to experience Asian culture without leaving Europe.
At the end of the afternoon we took the S-bahn to our Airbnb. Once there we quickly found a supermarket and I put together a meal for us in the evening. Since we hadn’t spoken to each other before leaving we hadn’t had the chance to catch up on everything we wanted to visit in the city. We quickly came to the conclusion that we wanted to visit the shops on Saturday because a lot are closed on Sunday, Sunday is museum day and Monday is for the last minute things.
The next day we went into town early and walked through Little Tokyo to the part of town where several shops are close together. We walked past the Tritonenbrunnen for the first stop of the day: Galeria or where you can find a Sephora. I bought Rare Beauty make-up and felt immediately in my element. My travel companion and I know each other through the book world, so of course we had to visit a bookstore together. Mayersche Droste is the largest bookstore in Düsseldorf with a huge English-language section. We were amazed and of course we bought books. We walked into a few more shops before we went to UNIQLO where I bought a Kuromi shirt from the latest Sanrio collection.
For lunch we went to Copenhagen Coffee Lab, which also has plenty of vegan options. The muffins are highly recommended! Düsseldorf doesn’t have a huge city centre so it’s easy to walk too far if you’re feeling energetic and of course my travel companion and I did. Once in Little Tokyo we first stopped at Rune Store, a specialty store for manga but also other related products. To be honest this was my favourite manga store, since the comics are sorted by publisher and then alphabetically which made everything very easy to find. Next stops: Manga-Mafia Store (manga specialty store) and Takagi (focused on Japanese culture).
The day before we had spotted the Korean supermarket Hanaro Markt. There we bought several products including the most delicious ice cream I had this year! Hanaro Markt has several products and not everything is Korean, also Japanese, Indonesian, etc.
For dinner we went to To1980 VEGAN for Vietnamese Street Food. We both had a fresh lemonade and a big bowl.
On Sunday we visited K21, the museum for modern art. It was different than I expected, but I definitely enjoyed some of the exhibitions. There are a lot of museums in Düsseldorf and there are still plenty I want to visit in the future, but the weather was great the days we were there and we wanted to make the most of it.For lunch we went to Hala Empanada at KiT Café. They even have a vegan menu, to be honest I can still taste the empanadas just thinking about them! We enjoyed the food by the water before walking along the river to Altstadt. It is highly recommended to walk through this part of Düsseldorf, it felt like we were suddenly somewhere else, in another century even. At chocolaterie Gut & Gerne we picked up some treats to take home before we continued to our last destination of the day: Hulala. There we drank a few mocktails. The food looked delicious too, but we decided to eat at the Airbnb so we had time in the evening to pack our bags.
Monday is travel day! But we had more than half the day to enjoy ourselves in the city before our trains left. The day before we had already figured out how it would work with renting a locker at the station. We found a large locker that fit both my medium suitcase and my travel companion’s small suitcase, tote bag and more.
With our hands free we went to the shops that we had not gotten to on Saturday. We also visited shops that we wanted to visit again, like the Korean supermarket to stock up on more food. After all, we now knew how much would still fit in our suitcases.
We spent the rest of the afternoon in Little Tokyo where we stopped at Rune Store where I bought a few things, sat at NADO for bubble tea and ended our trip at Hanaro Markt.
There was so much more we wanted to discover, from museums to other neighbourhoods, but at the same time it was also really nice to get to know 3 parts of the city really well. And we both immediately said: we’ll be back!
Düsseldorf is not for everyone and there is so much more to see in the city than what my travel companion and I did, but at the same time I think it’s really nice that we made such a specific trip out of it.
What would you like to see in Düsseldorf?
Love,
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