Wuppertal/Essen Germany, Saturday, June 25, 2011

We took a tour of Essen, Germany with Horst and Ortrun today.  Essen is north of Wuppertal about 25 miles and has an UNESCO World Heritage Site located there.

Edward and Ortrun on the bus tour

Cute sign for festival looks like a piano keyboard for the Klavier-Festival Ruhr – a piano festival. (note the small red piano under the second key on the left.

We saw the Jewish Synagogue building which is one of the largest, best preserved and architecturally most impressive testimonies to Jewish culture in pre-war Germany.

Also, one of Essen's most interesting places is the Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex, once the largest colliery in the world. Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it attracts 800,000 visitors a year.

jCoal Mine Complex

The Zollverein School of Management and Design in Essen Germany.  It is almost perfectly square and the floors are of varying heights with asymmetrical arrangement of square windows of varying sizes.  Very unusual and hard to distinguish how many floors are actually in the building.

Yes, this is a TOTAL STATION in Essen. This was not a major site on the bus tour but I thought I should include it.

Essen is also known for the famed metal-working Krupp family opened their first foundry here in 1810.  

The Villa Hügel is a mansion in Bredeney (part of the modern city of  Essen) in Germany. It belonged to the Krupp family of industrialists and was built by Alfred Krupp during 1873 as a residence. More recently, the Villa Hügel is the main office of the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach Foundation (major shareholder of the Thyssen-Krupp corporation) and houses an art gallery. The archive of the Krupp family and company is also located there.

The house has  259 rooms and occupies 8,100 m²  - that is 87,187 sq. ft.! It is on a 28 hectares (70 acres) park overlooking the River Ruhr and the Baldeneysee. 

It was raining the day of the tour so the pictures are not too exciting.

Villa Hügel – Krupp family mansion

Elaine inside the Krupp mansion

Ortrun and Horst in the Krupp Mansion

That evening we had dinner with Klaus and Jutta and Horst and Ortrun at Habbel’s essen and trinken (eat and drink) in Sprokhovel.  It is a Distillery and Brewery and Restaurant.

After dinner we stopped at their new house and enjoyed some wine and grappa.

Edward aka “George” enjoying some wine.

The ladies enjoying the evening.

Edward, Klaus, Ortrun, Elaine and Jutta

Klaus – a little grappa and relaxing.

This is our favorite picture.  I set the camera to take a picture with all of us and it went off before I could get in place (see my arm on the right).  We could not have had planned a more spontaneous expression than this.

Now we must go back to our room and rest.  We have a symphony concert tomorrow with friends of Horst and Ortrun. at the Stadhalle in Wuppertal.  They are doing West Side Story music.