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- Jul 4, 2024
- ☀️ 19 °C
- Altitude: 101 m
GermanyNorth Rhine-WestphaliaEssenMargaretenhöheGrugapark51°25’51” N 6°59’37” E
Essen
![](http://d2k8htqlk8yn1a.cloudfront.net/img/flags-png/de.png)
Leaving Hamburg behind, we made a short overnight stop in Essen to visit Hendrik and his girlfriend Antonia. It was a bit of a flying visit, and with both Antonia and Hendrick being doctors with their hectic work schedules we were very lucky to manage to meet up with them.
We arrived into Essen around 5.30pm on Thursday night and met up with Antonia while Hendrick was working his 24h shift at the hospital. Antonia took us for a walk around the park in Essen which was really nice, it felt like we'd been missing a bit of nature over the last couple of weeks. One particularly notable area of the park was the seaweed wall. They have a wall where they trickle salt water over seaweed which is growing on the wall and some benches facing the wall. Antonia told us this is so people can get some fresh salt air and its health benefits, which is lacking due to Essen being quite a long way inland. A bit of a foreign concept when you come from New Zealand but very cool to see.
Antonia then made us a beautiful vegetarian quiche for dinner before bed. The next day Antonia and Hendrick swapped places, with Antonia heading off to get 24h shift while Hendrick arrived home at about 9am. Fortunately Hendrick had a reasonably quiet shift so he was brought and cheerful when we met him. We headed out for coffee and breakfast and spent the full 5 hours we had with Hendrick non-stop chatting and catching up - it's been 10 years since Nathan last saw him. Unfortunately the 5 hours together was far too short, but there are potentially plans for Hendrick and Antonia to visit NZ in the future so hopefully it won't be another 10 years!
We then headed to the train station, and Hendrick helped us figure out the trains as our original train was delayed nearly an hour which would have caused us to miss all of our connecting trains and resulted in an absolute nightmare. Fortunately if this happens the German system allows you to catch any train you like to get to your final destination - so Hendrick assisted us to not have complete carnage on our way to Darmstadt.Read more