Dusseldorf Airport

Parkour Championship at Düsseldorf International Airport

June 7, 2010Harriet BaskasAirports, Contests, Entertainment, Events, Fun StuffDUS, Dusseldorf Airport, parkour, parkour championships

If you’re going to get stuck at a German airport, try to make it Düsseldorf International Airport (DUS) on the first Sunday of the month.

That’s when DUS has is its “Airlebnis” (air-experience) events and if you were there yesterday, Sunday, June 6, 2010, you would have seen athletes and visitors literally bouncing off the walls – and everything else – as DUS became the obstacle course for the German Parkour Championship.

What’s Parkour? Take a look at this:

There area oodles of other parkour (freerunning) videos on the web, but you get the picture… this is a really zany, potentially dangerous, but really fun-looking sport. But what kind of sport exactly?

According to Parkour US:

“Parkour or l’art du déplacement is NOT an extreme sport, rather it is a physical discipline that allow one to overcome their obstacles to get from point a to point b in the most efficient using the possibility of human body. Such movement may contain running, jumping, climbing, vaulting and other movements that may help the efficiency.”

At DUS, Parkour competitors – traceurs – were tested in two categories: speed and style, including “execution, flow, creativity, level of difficulty, and overall showmanship” and participants included the current world champion, a 15-year old from Germany.

The men and women who perform parkour make it look easy. So for novices who wanted to give it a try, there were professional instructors on hand to give lessons.

I’m waiting for the results of the championship and some photos from the day, so please be sure to check back. But in the meantime, I’m heading outside to practice.

Happy Souvenir Sunday from the WorldShop & Richmond Int’l Airport

February 21, 2010Harriet BaskasAirport shops, Airports, Bars, Fun Stuff, Layover, Museums, Observation Decks, Shopping, Souvenir Sunday, SouvenirsA380, beer mugs, cookie jar, Dusseldorf Airport, Edgar Allan Poe Museum, Hamburg Airport, Lufthansa, Munich Airport, Richmond International Airport

Lufthansa pilots have scheduled a four day strike beginning on Monday, February 22, 2010. Negotiations are currently underway, but if those talks fail to avert the strike, the carrier will be forced to cancel most of its flights. And that will leave passengers stuck at the airport.

The upside? If you do end up spending more time than you planned at a German airport, you’ll be able to find plenty of things to do.

Munich Airport, for example, has an outdoor observation deck and a great indoor/outdoor beer garden with an on-site brewery.

The Hamburg Airport also has observation decks as well as the Airport Model Exhibition – a miniature version of the airport complete with buildings, taxiways, runways, landing strips, and 8,000 light-emitting diodes that light up the tiny airport’s night sky – all on a scale of 1:500.

And at the Dusseldorf, Munich, Hamburg, and Berlin airports you’ll also find Lufthansa WorldShop stores, which offer a promising spot to do some Souvenir Sunday shopping.

The airline recently opened its second WorldShop store at the Frankfurt Airport (Terminal 1, Area B) and, like the others; the store is filled with travel items, backpacks, travel accessories, electronics, model aircraft, toys, and some other fun stuff. Shoppers can earn Miles & More award miles for items purchased here and – here’s a nice twist – also buy items using accumulated miles.

I’m especially taken with this A380 Cookie Jar

The cool container sells for about $107 – or 22,000 miles, so we can’t make it our pick for Souvenir Sunday, which usually has an upper limit of $10. But poking around the WorldShop catalog I did find this cute guy, which sells for 9 Euros (about $12) or 7500 miles.

But since this is Souvenir Sunday and do we have that under $10 rule (which may need to be re-adjusted soon for inflation..), we offer these items sent along by the folks at Virginia’s Richmond International Airport(RIC), where a variety of local museums are represented in the Hudson News store in the airport’s Atrium area, next to the security screening checkpoint for Concourse B.

These items are from the Edgar Allan Poe Museum

(Beer mugs! )

(Poe action figure – with removable raven! )

Have you found a great souvenir while stuck at the airport? If it’s under $10, “of” the city or region and, ideally, a bit offbeat, please snap a photo and send it along. It may show up as our pick for a future Souvenir Sunday.

13 million cranberries, Dusseldorf Airport’s Ski jump, and Amelia Earhart

February 5, 2010Harriet BaskasAir Travel, Airplanes, Art, Exhibits, Fun Stuff, Getting aroundAlbany International Airport, B.C., Dusseldorf Airport, Kanas, Museum of Flight, Richmond, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Wichita, Wichita Art Museum

This weekend would be a good time to have as my superpower the ability to travel anywhere in the world and be in several places at once.

If I could, I’d stop first in Richmond, British Columbia, a short SkyTrain ride away from the Vancouver International Airport to watch 13 million (!!) locally-grown cranberries get dumped into the Fraser River in front of the Richmond Olympic Oval to form a giant floating version of the maple leaf, rings and flame that make up the Canadian Olympic Committee logo.

Then I’d head over to the Dusseldorf International Airport to see if they finished trucking in enough snow (and turned the temperature down low enough) to make the world’s first indoor ski jump in an airport. When they sent this photo, they were just waiting for the snow to arrive.

It would be fun, too, to stop at New York’s Albany International Airport (ALB), where the newest art show, Material Witness, is now underway.

And it might be interesting to touch down in Wichita, Kansas. The Wichita Art Museum is one of the 100 or so museums around the country where Bank of America account holders can get free admission this weekend as part of the Museums on Us program. And look what the Wichita Art Museum is using to promote an exhibition of works of paper.

(Robert Cottingham, Wichita (1985)

But, alas, the ability to be everywhere at once is not my super power.

So instead, I’ll stick close to home this weekend and pay a visit to the Museum of Flight, just up the road from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, where there’s an exhibit titled In Search of Amelia Earhart.

This exhibit includes many of Earhart’s personal artifacts, including a suede jacket she wore on her 1932 solo transatlantic flight, two flight suits, a helmet, a scarf, newsreel footage and photos.

Amelia Earhart and her Lockheed L-10E Electra NR 16020 c. 1937. | The Museum of Flight

Love the layover: straight to the moon from Düsseldorf Airport

January 29, 2010Harriet BaskasAir Travel, Art, Environment, Events, Exhibits, Fun Stuff, Layoverairport exhibits, Dusseldorf Airport, Gasometer, Moon, Ruhr 2010, ski jump

Next weekend, February 6 and 7, 2010, visitors to the Düsseldorf International Airport will be entertained by skiers and snowboarders performing stunts and jumps on a 130-foot long ski slope set up right in the shopping arcade of the terminal.

Pretty impressive by itself, but if you’re heading to Düsseldorf to see the world’s first indoor ski jump at an airport, you may as well go visit the moon.

(The ‘Largest Moon on Earth’ – sculpture and photo by Wolfgang Volz)

A reproduction and exhibit of the solar system — including an 82-foot wide moon sculpture that is the largest moon sculpture in the world — is on display inside a 380-foot tall former gas container, in nearby Oberhausen.

The exhibit, Out of this World – Wonders of the Solar System, also includes impressive replicas of the sun and its planets and is open through December 30, 2010 as one of the projects of “Ruhr 2010”, a year-long series of art events and exhibits in Germany’s Rhine Ruhr area, near Düsseldorf.

Souvenir Sunday at Düsseldorf Airport

October 18, 2009Harriet BaskasAir Travel, Fun Stuff, Shopping, Souvenir Sunday, SouvenirsAirport shopping, Dusseldorf Airport

Happy Souvenir Sunday from Düsseldorf Airport!

On Sundays we take a look at some of the fun things you can find when you’re stuck at the airport. Our rules: the items must be under $10, “of” the city or region and, ideally, a bit offbeat.

This week: Germany’s Düsseldorf Airport, where these giant giraffes – they really are giant – in the center of the terminal greet travelers as an advertisement for a rental car company.

We almost took home this cute little dressed up doggy, but it was way over $10,

So instead picked up a few of these “wieners.”

Have you found a fun souvenir while stuck at the airport? If you do, please snap a photo of it and send it along. It may be featured on a future edition of Souvenir Sunday.