New year’s sunrise in Duisburg!
In recent years, we can see more and more people watching cherry blossom in spring, which is one of the most important events in Japan. There are a few more which could still take off, one of them being watching the sunrise on the first day of the year, called Hatsuhinode. To be honet, it’s a super stressful event in Japan with crowds of people everywhere early in the morning. But it looks like elsewhere around the world no one does that, which makes it extremely comfortable where I go.
I must admit it was rather daring to organise it in Germany, in the country in which there’s hardly any day with the sun. Well, in the current circumstances, there’s also no other choice either. And not so surprisingly, it was predicted to be cloudy the whole week.
Today’s meeting time was 6:45am. Compared to what I’d do in Japan, it’s extremely late, but still way earlier than the usual meeting time on normal hikes. We took an S-Bahn to Buchholz and started hiking.
Whenever I do a sunrise hike in Japan, I have the feeling that it takes like forever for the sun to come out when the sky is already quite bright. Interestingly, that was not quite the case here: It was super dark when we arrived in Buchholz. After we crossed the town, hardly anything was visible.
But then it started getting brighter, as we were approaching the tower in the middle of the 6 lakes, from where I wanted to see the sunrise.
By the way, it was comfortably above 10 degrees this morning. Perfect temperature to wait for the sunrise (while I’d usually freeze in Japan), but also a bit weird experience at the same time.
We still had around 15 min to go when we were on top of the tower. From there it was clear: too cloudy. I mean, it was a relatively bright day, but in order to see the sunrise, the sky must be perfectly free of clouds, because they tend to get thicker towards the horizon. Anyway, we waited for it until after the sunrise and left the place. At the same time, this also belongs to the experience – since it’s not always possible to see the sunrise, it’s precious to be able to see one. So I’ll look forward to the one next year 🙂
Anyway, we hiked farther to Duisburg Schlenk. Already when we were leaving the tower it looked like a totally normal day.
We then took a subway back to Düsseldorf and had a super large brunch together. In the end, while the purpose of the day was not fulfilled, it was a successful event. Maybe we should do it again next year.
