Old town skyline.

As mentioned before — sheep!

I was so warm at this point I had my coat unzipped.

There are 9 statues in this series, scattered throughout Dusseldorf.

Looking across to the fancy riverside houses.

Slightly scary animatronic Christmas toy display in a department store window.

Christmas decorations.

Boxing day, I woke up early in Munich to hop on a plane to Dusseldorf. I had a 10-hour stopover there before flying to Beijing, Singapore, then Perth. Fortunately, even though I was a bit bleary from an early start, Dusseldorf is a lovely city to spend a day and the weather worked in my favour — unlike Munich, it wasn’t snowing there that day, and was even sunny for a while.

The day made a relaxing break between a fun but hectic Christmas with family and a long flight. I spent most of the day down at the river, walking around to try and offset the upcoming hours of sitting on planes. Though I made sure to get in some gluehwein, too!

PS: More postcards from…

Practical details for future reference: Dusseldorf airport has a left-luggage facility which is open from 5 am – 11 pm and is staffed (!) so I — rightly or wrongly — felt safe leaving all my luggage there, including my laptop, and went around town with just my wallet and phone. This made for a much nicer day than I was expecting since I didn’t have a heavy bag. The office is in carpark P3 and is signposted quite well. Cost was 3.50 euro/day.

You can either get the S-bahn into town every half hour from a stop right at the airport, or take the skytrain to the main airport train station and get a regular train into town — these seem to run more frequently. The train trip takes <10 minutes either way and costs 2.50 euro.