Rob told us that Munster has good christmas markets so this week we’re going there. Initially we were looking at how to get there – Deutsche Bahn has all kind of schemes for their train tickets and it’s awfully complicated. There’s off-peak tickets, group tickets, normal tickets, the list goes on. We used these day pass tickets – basically a flat rate to use any public transport in the westfalen (westphalia in het engels) area.
And since it’s a day pass… and christmas markets only look good at night…
we took a stop in Dusseldorf.
Dusseldorf has this street which is famous for its antifa activity – they also graffiti all their houses. the whole street is filled with this kind of interesting graffiti art and it’s really beautiful.
There were interesting spaces like a community library – not just for books but also clothes and tools for people to borrow and use as a community and it’s really something adorable to see; communities sharing so openly and freely and without fear. I’m jealous of this kind of atmosphere.
So Dusseldorf is quite interesting, it’s really far inland but they still pride themselves on their harbour. (fun fact: “haven” is port in Dutch. “Hafen” is in German. “luchthaven” is airport in Dutch. I’ll let you guess what “lucht” means.)
By the harbour are these three buildings. They’re built by Frank Ghery (Who also built Building 32 in MIT). Most buildings built by him are considered hard to live in because of the unusual floorplans and also because the designs often aren’t optimised to humans but for aesthetic. These seemed to be similar – occupancy rate didn’t seem high, a lot of them were uninhabited or closed.
With that we went to the christmas market. Munster doesn’t have one christmas market – it has five. We got Gulhwein, a spiced wine mix that contains cinnamon and citrus peels. It comes in these cups you pay 1 euro for as a deposit. warm wine on a cold day. it was really good, if a bit on the pircey side. But hey, i’m a tourist, right?
There was a church as well – it was doing an exhibit on the night sky. It was a really nice change for a light show. In Singpaore all the light shows are obnoxiously bright, everything is craving your attention, flashing and pulsating and moving and sparkling. This one was the projection of the stars in the night sky. still. barely visible. simple. i sat there and stared at apollo and tried to find polaris. this was all in the front of the church, where the altar usually is. it was beautiful.
