Germany – Muenster

Muenster is nice except for the bikes. It’s a student town, surrounded by a park and its palace has been turned into a university building. There’s bikes parked everywhere and worse, people riding them all over the place, sometimes with trailers that are actually baby prams. And they go everywhere: the road, the footpath…you’re not safe from them anywhere! I don’t know how many times we were nearly run down by bikes!
But aside from that, the buildings in the old centre are pretty:

The arcades everywhere have been maintained, unlike in England:

We went into City Hall to view the Friedenssaal (peace room) (only 1.50 Euro each) which has seen quite a few successful peace negotiations and treaties signed:


 
The rooster has a funny story attached. It’s a gold plated silver statue/goblet tribute to the rooster that saved the city during a siege. It was the last rooster left alive and the people were starving. The mayor decided to kill it to feed the people, but it escaped. It ran outside the city walls and the besieging army saw the rooster coming out and thought the city must have an abundance of food – enough to release the rooster – so they gave up and went home. Hence the rooster saved the city:

Next stop was the market next to the cathedral. We’d heard the market was fantastic, so we wandered through it and stopped to taste lots of yummy things – enough we didn’t even need lunch (though it didn’t stop us having some…):

Then we went into the first of many churches today. This was the St Paul’s Cathedral:
 

Another church – Ueberwasserkirche (over water church):

And the University Church (no longer used as a church):

Then we wandered around town for a little while, in search of another church. We were getting a little peckish, so we stopped for lunch:

Getting closer:
  

  
And here it was – the St Lambert church. The organ hangs from ceiling in a scary way, I must say!:



Oh look: another church!:


And on the way to a church around the corner we came across this naughty dog… before stopping for coffee:

Hey! There’s a church! St Martin’s:

Then it was high time we got to the palace (being used by the University) before it got too dark to take photos. The way there was through the park that surrounds Muenster:
 

And the palace (university). Unfortunately, the building is being renovated at the front, so not so pretty:


The back looked good though, especially in the late sunshine:
 
Then we found a bus to take us to the central station, since we’d probably done 10kms today and our feet hurt!