Shanghai Bob

Wednesday through Friday I visited Manpreet and Volker at their new digs in Düsseldorf.

Düsseldorf started out as a dorf (”village”) on the River Düssel, but by now it has grown into a full-blown city on the River Rhein.

I gathered another data point for my upcoming “Gelato Index”, a measure of purchasing power parity based on the cost of two scoops of gelato.  It’s 2 Euros in the Königsalle.

Strangely, one of the big attractions in Düsseldorf is Japanese food.  The city has just over 600,000 inhabitants, and around 1% of them are Japanese.  We had ramen.

We had to wait in line outside the place (just like at a real ramen-ya in Tokyo), and had an interesting exchange in which the Japanese hostess took our order in German while we conversed in English.  When we had finished ordering, we offered the menu to our Japanese neighbor in Japanese, and he, having heard our conversation, accepted in English.

My train home was delayed over an hour by a bomb scare.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 12th, 2008 at 1:38 pm and is filed under germany, travel.