beautiful day in another new city
today was a really fantastic day. we left in the morning from work to drive to Münster to take down an exhibition that D and J put together before E and I arrived. we had never seen what it looked like but were forewarned that it would take a long time to disassemble because it took so long to assemble in the first place. we had to leave early.
the drive out was, of course, seemingly endless and very beautiful German countryside. it was very different from what we saw on our way to Liechtenstein; no mountains and few hills. but it was very beautiful farm country. I thought of my dad a lot because it had a very distinct Iowa feeling to me. although, with a lot more trees between farms. but there was corn everywhere. D and J said it wasn’t corn for people to eat though; a different kind that is mostly fed to cows. I need to look into this.
when we arrived to Schöppingen, which is a very rural feeling suburb of Münster and where the exhibition was located, we discovered that the exhibition was being housed in a renovated farmhouse type of building. it was very cool. the exhibition itself was absolutely stunning. we spent a good half an hour just photographing it. it was created using different plastic modules that were either riveted or screwed together. disassembling it actually went extremely quickly and we were able to drive into the city center of Münster to see the cathedral there and have a little snack at an Italian ice restaurant. before we left, though, we were given a quick tour around the exhibition buildings and where visiting artists can stay and work. we saw a lot of really interesting things including a completely broken apart boat and a room tilted on its side. E even did the Michael Jackson Smooth Criminal lean in it.
in Münster we saw St. Paul’s Cathedral, St. Lambert’s Church, the Prinzipalmarkt in the main city center and, of course, a million zillion bikes.
St. Paul’s Cathedral was a very interesting church because it is a mixture of both Romanesque and Gothic styles. the outside of it has hints of the Gothic we’ve seen over and over on the Koln Cathedral but also some very different stylistic elements too. it was huge on the inside and has an equally huge astronomical clock on the interior. a lot of people were gathered around it! I wish we could have seen all the dials move while we were waiting but alas!, no.
St. Lambert’s Church was especially neat because we kind of stumbled onto it. you can see the spires from a lot of places in the city but sometimes, of course, you can’t. at one point when we were wandering around we couldn’t see it and then, turning a corner into the Prinzipalmarkt, all of a sudden it was looming ahead. it was enough to stop both E and I in our tracks and take photographs right in the middle of the street. St. Lambert’s Church has a very similar history to the Koln Cathedral, and it is similar in its Gothic style, because it was started very early, ran out of money and postponed and then picked back up again for finishing when the Gothic revival happened.
conclusion: Münster is so gorgeous! I am reasonably sure that it is near the top of the list in my favorite visited cities even though we did not spend more than a few hours there.
