A day in Bochum

Bochum. A city sandwiched between Dortmund and Essen. Famous not for its excellent university but for the singer Herbert Grönemeyer and his song "Bochum", which is practically the city's hymn. Everyone around here knows the words and everyone joins in when it's being sung!

Cactus veil - cactus house

Our day started out with a walk through my most favourite place here. The university's botanical garden. I love this place. It is an extensive garden with different geographical areas including tropical, savannah, and desert in the green houses. Another amazing thing about this garden is that it is absolutely free. The only gripe that I have is that the signs are only in German. 

The green house

To get to the main gate take the U-35 to Lennershof, turn left coming out of the station and walk straight down the road. At the end of the road you will see the university buildings on your right, walk keeping them on your right hand side and as the road bends around at the southern end of campus you will find the main entrance.

This is were we started out on a sunny but cold autumn day.

Our first stop were the ponds, because we have not been there for a while. They are great for a photo shoot. In the summer they are inhabited by wildlife and if you are lucky you will see the resident water snake.

Water snakes and Sequoia trees

We headed along the path and turned up hill to get to the green houses passing the vegetable garden on the way. Because of the crazy weather things were still growing. We saw artichokes, tomatoes, leeks, napa cabbage and lots of different herbs.

Kale (?) and artichoke in the vegetable garden

I love the green houses and this time I had time to take some pictures of my favourite plant, the cactus. I particularly love this plant because it's something I can grow without killing. Almost all plants die in my house. Cacti have the highest life expectancy!

A selection of Cacti

The tropical house reminds me of Sri Lanka. There is all the vegetation that you would find in my parents back garden including coconut, banana, cocoa, bamboo, shoe flowers and many many more. There is a turtle in the pond, some type of birds walking around and a stream runs through the middle of the green house. Not a great place for photos because of the lack of contrasting colours (everything is green) and the humidity that fogs up your lens!

A typical Sri Lankan shoe flower

The Savannah is pretty boring. Once they had a butterfly exhibit in there. That was really cool. On the weekend you can buy tea and coffee at the entrance and there is a watering can by the door where you can make a donation. Which I highly recommend if you can. The green houses are also the only place in the gardens with restrooms!

Chinese tea garden - from outside

After the green houses we headed to the Chinese tea garden. It's perfect for a photo shoot, which is why we had to dodge around a bride and groom and a photographer with a huge tripod. The path is very narrow so it makes it a bit difficult! Don't forget not to feed the carp in the pond! The garden is authentic and when some kids vandalized it a couple of years ago they had to close it down until they could get replacements manufactured and sent from China.

We had had enough of the gardens, because it was really cold, but there is lots more to see if you have time.
Heading out of the tea garden and upwards we climbed up the long stair case to get to the middle of the university. After a couple more stair cases we were at the heart of the campus. The Audimax.

Audimax - Ruhr University Bochum

Opposite the Audimax is the university's art collection. Being free of charge, warm and having a WC this was our next stop. You are not allowed to take photographs in the museum so I can't show you what it looks like from the inside. There is a bit of art, some very old Greek style sculptures, some old coins, an impressive oil lamp display and an even more impressive pottery display. It's so impressive that we asked the person working there if they were replicas. She claimed they were original! It will take you a maximum of 45 minutes to get through this very small museum.

Kunst Sammlung der Uni Bochum

Our next stop was the graffiti tunnel. To get there we continued walking towards the subway station "Ruhr Universitaet". Crossed over Universitaetsstr. and then took the escalators down to the bus station. From there you just continue in the same direction and turn left and go down through the tunnel. Be very careful. Even thought the speed limit is 30 km/h through the tunnel people usually drive 50. The sidewalks are narrow and you may have to navigate around graffiti artists.

I'm not sure how it works, but the art work changes sporadically. If you are lucky you will see some amazing graffiti. But you could also come after someone has sprayed the whole tunnel with some crazy text. Amateurs stick to the periphery, so in the tunnel itself you'll almost never find something that is not worth looking at. Here are some shots of what was on show last week.

There are many options for food at the "Uni Center", which is at the top of the escalator. Currently you can choose from 3 bakeries, a vegan cafe, at least 2 pizza places, Chinese food, doner Kebab, a mini pub, two burger places and more. Note that the Chinese food is oily, bad fast food and in the restaurant on the upper level I was once served a salad with a live caterpillar in it. The food and the service sucks there. We had lunch at burger brothers, who have two vegetarian options which were both good.

If it is you have not visited the German national mining museum, you should definitely head there next. The U-35 subway will take you directly there. At the moment they are renovating and only the mine is open. Given that we've been down there a hundred times we didn't want to go again. I'm waiting for the renovation to be done (summer 2019?) and then I'll go see what they've done to it. This museum will take up most of your afternoon.

And if you've never been before you should definitely take in an evening at Bochum's one and only musical Starlight Express. It's in German so if you don't understand the language read the story before you go. It's not so much about the story but more about the roller skates and costumes. We didn't go see it this time. We've been there twice before and our kids 3 times. True Bochumers!!

Our day did not end at lunch. Afterwards we went to see our friends art exhibition and then went home to play the new board games we had bought the day before at the Spiele Messe in Essen.

If you are looking for great places to have dinner in Bochum try Yamas for excellent Greek Mezze (it's a wine bar and usually very loud, reservations are a must). If you have a car and need a sushi fix visit Takeshi's for expensive, delicious sushi (reservations recommended). Great East Asian food can be found at Hatoky (avoid the sushi), fries between Kortumstr. 1 and 3, and the best ice cream ever (seasonal) at 4eck. Of course there are plenty of places to eat and surprisingly Bochum has pretty good food with sushi and Indian food being the exceptions.

Riding Around Kemnadersee

Not something I usually find myself doing... sitting in Starbucks on a Sunday afternoon. However, having to wait for two hours before my kids perform, on the stage just outside the window, was just too much time to waste. The free Wi-Fi, which is hard to get here in Bochum (especially on a Sunday), was too tempting. Plus of course I do get a cup of tea for the price, a warm environment (yes, it is just 20 degrees Celsius in August with no sun) and access to a clean toilet. Definitely worth it. I didn't realize that I'd get live classical music thrown into the package played by the Jungendsinfonieochester, Bochum!

Jungendsinfonieochester Bochum - Dr.-Ruer-Platz, Bochum

Initially I was a bit bummed that there were no free seats outside but now that a table has just freed up I've decided that I'm just going to stay inside so that my tea and my hands don't cool down too quickly. After all the view is not that bad.

The view from my seat

Although today is quite chilly, yesterday was perfect and a perfect example of how you can have fun in your own backyard and it doesn't have to cost an arm and a leg. My girls were a bit disappointed since we decided the day before yesterday that we wouldn't go to Mallorca for 7 days over the fall vacation. They really want to make the trip because everyone else does. They expressed real interest in seeing what others do while on vacation. After all we are just a boring family. Pottering off to places across the world, never staying for long at one place, and always having something to do. So it was good to have a perfect day to have a vacation at home.

The sky was so blue yesterday and it was just warm enough to go out with a sweater. My husband and I could not help but have to go outside, so we decided on taking our bikes and riding around Kemnader See. I was reminded that a friend was coming over to play so we quickly called her up and asked her to come early with her bike. After blowing up everyone's tires and adjusting all the bike seats we were ready to go.
The weather turned out to be really great for biking and we all got rid of our sweaters within a short period of time.

As we headed down the hill we met the local grass management. Now it's not like we live in a rural area. Bochum has a population of about 370 thousand and we live right next to the Ruhr University. So it might strike some people as an unusual technique:

There was even a shepherd and a sheep dog :) Of course rather modern day with an SUV parked nearby and a radio blaring!! The kids were a bit unnerved but a short blast with our bicycle bells made the sheep move out of the way. Actually I'm rather glad it was sheep, we've had goats before and they are a bit shifty!

One thing that I realized on this trip was that it is really difficult to take pictures while biking! I didn't have any pockets that I could use while biking so my eldest took my camera in her backpack. That made things even more challenging.

The biking path around Kemnader See is just over 10 km long. It's mostly flat so quite easy for the kids to manage. For us the hard part is going back home since we live on a hill. But you could also drive down to the lake and then take your bikes around. Another wonderful thing about the biking path (which is separate from the pedestrian path) is that a lot of it has been newly paved. In actual fact it's been made into a, soon to be officially opened, inline skating trail but since the "inliners" (as they are called here in Germany) go as fast as the bikes it's not a problem to share with them.

I've made a map of the path we took on Google maps


Our first stop was for lunch.

We had fries at an Italian restaurant by the side of the lake. Not the cheapest fries but we got huge portions and huge amounts of ketchup and mayonnaise (yes, in Germany you eat your fries with a mixture of ketchup and mayo and it rarely comes for free, in this case each portion was 0.50 € ). This place also has regular Italian food and a fancy looking pizza oven. As the weather was good we sat overlooking the lake and enjoyed our lunch which we supplemented with cherry tomatoes and grapes.

As we were sitting there having lunch we noticed that there was a bike and inline skate rental place in the same building as the restaurant. We'd lived here for almost 5 years and never stumbled on it! This could have been really useful before I bought my bike last year. We didn't check the prices but I'm tempted to rent some inline skates next time and skate with the girls..

After lunch we continued our trip around the lake. The lake has been artificially created by damming the Ruhr so you have to cross the water at both ends of the lake. On the south western side one crosses alongside the dam itself. It's a bit hidden, and not marked, so you have to be a bit careful. At some point you come to a junction with 4 options. At this point you basically have to take the path that turns very sharply left (basically a U-turn). Once you've taken the turn you will see the bridge and the dam. There is a huge sign asking all bike riders to dismount and push their bikes across the bridge but, as you can imagine, most bikers ignore the signs. This really disturbs the kids. After all it's very clear, even they can read it, any adult must be able to understand what they are expected to do!

Once we were over the dam we turned left but had to stop immediately because one of the kids bikes started rattling. Hubby inspected the bike but couldn't figure out what was wrong. Luckily my older one figured out that it was just a piece of metal hitting the spokes of the tire. That was easy enough to resolve and then we were on our way.  If you go straight, instead of left, you arrive at Haus Kemnader which has a nice little music museum that is free of charge. They also have a fancy restaurant if you are up for something more fancy and relaxing. It does not over look the Ruhr. Just after the damn there is a small kiosk if you need to pick something up. It does not take long to get here from where we had lunch so we didn't stop. I've been there before though and it sells drinks and ice-cream. I don't think it sells any hot food.

I really like this part of the path even though it's squeezed between the highway and the lake. It's higher up than either the highway or the pedestrian path and both sides are densely overgrown with trees. This dampens a lot of the noise and makes you feel like you are in a forest somewhere as opposed to squashed between a highway and a lake.

At the end of the forest path we passed under the highway. Apparently, so I was told later, you can actually take a short cut and cross the river alongside the highway. There are ramps going up on both sides which are rather difficult to see, which is why I missed it even on my second time past! If you don't take the short cut just keep turning left at every junction. One of them actually opens up onto a main road and there are no signs as to where the bike path continues. But here you need to take a left turn which will bring you to yet another pub and most importantly an ice-cream van!! We really enjoyed having ice-cream here last time we were riding around the lake. This time we decided to have ice-cream once we'd finished the loop because we still felt like we had lunch in our tummies.

After crossing the bridge turn left again and follow the path all the way around back to the beginning. Once you get to the end you'll start bumping into people. I nearly had an accident with a zigzagging toddler. I didn't realize he was zigzagging because he had just got onto the path and his father just left him behind and rode off. I assumed he could ride. So since he was riding on the left I passed him on the right. On the right... probably a  big mistake but I was riding fast and he slow, really slow and he was almost on the grass on the left side of the path. My goodness he cut back into me and then after almost knocking me off my bike he cut back to the left and nearly knocked off the on coming rider (who was riding very fast). You know, if you're child can't handle the rules of the biking path it's totally fine to have them ride on the pedestrian trail. At one place, see map, even we rode on the pedestrian part because the bike path is just wide enough for two well experienced riders to pass. Last time when I took it it was disastrous, but I didn't know any better and was just following the signs. It's really dangerous to be  riding on a path with people whizzing past you especially if you don't know which is your left and right. The first time we did it, earlier this year, I spent my time riding behind the girls continually shouting, "bike coming, move to the right!" I felt like a broken record.

We ended our circuit with an ice-cream. It's not the best ice-cream but at least it is "homemade".

Of course once we got home it was time for a nice pot of tea and a cookie.

Right, the kids are ready to sing so it's time to for me to get going. Enjoy!