Hiking report

Hiking from Velbert Langenberg to Essen Kupferdreh

There was this storm last year in July, which disrupted a lot of connections in North Rhine-Westphalia. One connection was this one from Wuppertal to Essen, which I don’t think is a particularly important one for the region, but if you like hiking, you’d miss out a lot of great opportunities. Recently, I realised that it was open again, so I put today’s hike. It looked a bit easy for this time of the year, but it’s still a nice area so why not.

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Essen used to be a super hot area some time ago, as there were so many people living in the nearby area. It was so much so that those days I had to make sure that the train connection was more or less ok from Essen wherever we were going, because they outnumbered people from elsewhere. Now those days are over, but still there’s usually a significant number of people whenever we go to Essen, just like today.

Right after we left the train station, I realised that there was a Bismarck tower very close to where we were walking. Bismarck towers are the ones that you can find everywhere in Germany, and most of them are simply open to the public. This one was indeed also open and we could climb up to the top of the tower. It had a metal frame but otherwise we could see the entire area from there. Only one problem: there were too many people for such a small tower, so that the first ones kind of had to leave the tower as soon as the stairway was cleared.

I had already imagined it, but there were a few places on the way where it was not really clear how to proceed, which is a bit rare in the south of Essen, because the nature around this area is usually super well organized. Today, I took a relatively unknown path, so that there was a high risk of trouble, but in total I would say it was more or less ok.

This area between Wuppertal and Essen has vast fields everywhere. In the summer, there’s too much sun and in the winter the wind is really cold, but in this period of time, you see the fresh green grasses that move as the wind goes ahead. The best place to be in the spring. Pity that the sun was not there.

We had a break in Nierenhof. Actually none of the restaurants were open for some reason. Anyway we sat in a small green spot in the city center.

I could simply end this blogpost saying we had an ice cream at the end of the hike, but today, after the ice cream, as we had to wait for the train for quite some time, we played “Finnish bus stop”, which is really the most stupid game I’ve ever known – here’s how it goes: All the participants first make a circle and everyone looks down. Then one person says “1 2 3 the bus arrived” and in this moment everyone looks up at the same time, where you have to stare at one person of your choice. If the person you’re staring at is also staring at you, both of you have to scream and run away (meaning you are out of the game). It simply keeps going over and over again until one person or two would remain in the end. It’s called Finnish bus stop here in Germany, because allegedly Finns are socially so awkward that they’d get a heart attack if someone is looking at them. Obviously, it’s just a joke. Really, Germans making fun of other people for being socially awkward.

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