Half way between Düsseldorf and Bonn lies Cologne, the only city in NRW with over a million inhabitants. Here the Rhine is 400 metres wide and 35 of its waterway kilometres skirt the municipal region. “It is like a bacillus that can attack anyone as soon as they walk through one of the old city gates. Just half a night in this Coelln – and you take life and the world differently, more lightly, as if floating on the apparently sluggish waves of the Rhine,” enthused the Baroque artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), himself almost a native of NRW – from Siegen. Founded by one of the “bad girls” of Roman history, Agrippina, the mother of Emperor Nero, Cologne is an outdoor museum, with its ancient excavation sites, its huge cathedral, and its many Romanesque churches. It can keep the interested visitor in thrall his whole life long. At the same time it is the largest media city in NRW. And no city could be more future-oriented. In Cologne you have to be lucky to meet someone who is not “in films”. A powerful past, a powerful present; a city with five seasons of the year – if you include Carnival, the season of the jesters.

West of Cologne, around Frechen and Türnich, you can see what huge bitumen excavators actually look like. And experience how complicated it is for the people living near the open-cast mine to fight both for the maintenance of their jobs and homes, and for the preservation of nature.

Or travel on the Rhine, or along the Rhine further southwards. Every cliff you see has been written about, every bend in the river set to music. If you are lucky you will read about this in world literature. If not, you will hear about it from some ageing male voice choir. When you arrive in Bonn, visit the house in which Ludwig van Beethoven was born, or the House of History, or the Museum Mile with Germany’s most frequented museum, the Bundeskunsthalle – a must!

 

P.S.: I would like to include a corpulent angler on the gravel promontory in Duisburg Ruhrort, opposite Schmitz Söhne Maschinenbau. He sits there every day in summer with his green umbrella to protect him from the sun and his white alligator T-shirt. His bicycle trailer has a Hawaii registration plate. Aloha State. As if the beauty of an inland harbour in NRW could compare ...