I'm ending a brief sojourn to Düsseldorf, the capital of my home state, North-Rhine Westfalia, traditionally catholic-conservative as well as a mainstay for Germany's unions & social-Democrat workers

I can't remember ever having been here, but must have been as a child; when my parents were young, in the late 60's, they apparently used to drive here a few times a year to do "window shopping".

They probably chose to visit the one grand "Prachtstraße" (street of great splendour) the city seems to have to offer: Königsallee, usually abbreviated to "Kö" - a broad, light street with wide pavements and middle isle strip of mostly green... It mainly offers s lot of hot (sic) couture places of trade (like the one pictured - note the black-laquered cat), with appended tightish street cafés. There's also at least one beautiful 4-storey old building, copper-roofed, with big stone faces of lions, on one side, as well as an unfortunately big green sign "kaufhof", which probably lights up at night (aaaarrgh!), on top.

The rest of the small bit of the inner city I saw on my two-hourly excursion, from the central railway station to the Kö, was pretty dead, dirty & dingy. There was even an old Beate Uhse shop near the station - I felt transported to the 80's. One bright side, here & on-Kö: You get to see a lot of Asian faces - Chinese, if I picked up bits of spoken words correctly...

T.b.d.