Starying Local in Dortmund

The Pynchon conference was being hosted in the IBZ on campus of Dortmund Technical University, so we stayed in an AirBnB just a few bus stops down the street from the university. Verein Strasse on the 447 bus. I surely could have walked it, just a few kilometers away.

Dortmund, at about 587k people, is the 9th largest city in Germany, housed the popular Borussia Dortmund (the only soccer team I knew in the Bundesliga besides Bayern Munich), and has a rich minority population. Tourists in our neighborhood were, eh, rare.

The AirBnB was the top flat in a building, a two bedroom, one bath apartment, with an en-closable living room, two twin beds in one room, and a modest kitchen.

View from the main bedroom

The building was on a one-way street that led down to busy street. Up that street was a doner-kabob place we ate at a few times, and on the corner itself was a laundromat, something we'd be needing before moving on from Dortmund.

Down the street from us was a neighborhood park, visible below as the trees spilling out into the street from the left:

When we first passed it on the first afternoon after we dropped our stuff off and started exploring, there were kids there playing with no adults. So we were comfortable with the idea of the kids heading there by themselves. Corrie sent them often, when they weren't going to Cologne  to see the cathedral.

Here's the park from the street, but while it looks like dusk (and it was), the time of year and latitude betrays the time itself:

9:37 pm

On the Friday evening, after the early end of the conference, making dinner and finishing laundry, I took the kids to the family-friendly concert at a jazz bar in downtown Dortmund. It was an easy trip using the light rail.

I'll mention it later, since it was Pynchon adjacent.

Once Corrie called Camille "camembert" as a term of endearment, and when I saw this advert painted on a building, I had to snap a picture.

Dortmund, in western Germnay, a hundred miles or so from the Netherlands, is lush and green, and on a long field trip from DTU to a coal mine, I got to see a cross section of town on a city bus. The trip took nearly forty-five minutes winding through town, and it was remarkable. The street was a bus street, so a commercial thoroughfare, and was spotted with apartment flats like where we stayed along the entire route.

The parks were lush, like above, and I found a nature trail behind the IBZ, which showed off the general beauty of the region. Corrie and the kids visited the Zoo, took a train to see the cathedral in Cologne, and generally did local-living items. It warmed up substantially by the time we left, the last two nights were spent with us sleeping with the windows wide open and using no sheets or blankets. Nobody really had AC, since they neevr really needed it in years past, and the infrastructure was nonexistent.

It was a vey pleasant place to spend a week.