To be perfectly honest, I had never heard of Dortmund before.  However, I met these two Germans in Bangkok who were from there and when I was making my way though Germany, I thought I would reach out and see if they were in town and wanted to hang out.  I did learn eventually that Dortmund is apparently very famous for their football (soccer)team but obviously I don’t really follow soccer and therefore did not know that.  Anyways, Leah offered up the spare room in her parents place and I graciously accepted.  I took the train from Cologne and then met her downtown for some exploration.  While I was waiting to meet up however, I did find a brewery to relax in.  It was called Hovels and was a weird mix between old traditional and a bit commercial.  I didn’t really know how to feel about it.  The beer was good enough and chilling on the patio was pretty great!

I also needed to find a dollar store to get some buckets since that was an inside joke from Bangkok and apparently Dortmund did not have buckets.  So I brought my own!

I made fun of Leah a lot when we were in Bangkok because she really wanted to go to Zara.  There was a big Zara in one of the malls and so the rest of us went exploring while Leah shopped…. FOR TWO HOURS.  For whatever reason after that I sent a picture of myself in front of every Zara I saw on the rest of my trip and sent it to the group chat.   So when we were in Dortmund, we had to find the original Zara that turned her onto it in the first place!

She showed me around downtown a bit and then we headed back to her parents place for dinner.  After dinner we headed back into town to see what we could get up to on a Tuesday night in Dortmund.  Spoiler alert, not much.  We did meet up with Marla who was the other friend from Bangkok and tried to see what was up.  We wandered around for a little bit and hung out in some empty bars.  It was great to catch up and honestly didn’t really matter what we did.  We drank some beer out of the buckets and got late night food.  Couldn’t have asked for anything more.

The next morning I woke up and went for a run through the park near her home and then had to prepare for my trip over to Leipzig which was my next beer focused stop on my way up to Berlin.

It was a quick stop, was was amazing to see a few people I had met months before, and given the opportunity to be shown their home towns and in this case their home.  I had a great time despite the lack of photos and stories to tell.

On to the next one!