Tag Archive for Muenster

BORN TO PEDAL

December 14, 2009 Blog No comments

My my, do I have an awful lot to update on… And with only four days before I’m flying back home!! I can’t even begin to describe how excited I am for Christmas!

But in this post we’re going back to late November ‘09… If asked to name two of the most popular things in Germany, beer and bikes would probably be among some of them, along with bread, staring and waiting at lights (heeheehee). So what do you get when you combine the two?

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YOU GET A BIERBIKE THAT’S WHAT!! A bar on wheels! What an EPIC idea! It only needs 6 people to pedal, but you can have up to 16 on one Bierbike. If you check out Bierbike.de then you can see which cities it’s available in (Dortmund in March!!). We did ours in Muenster, capital city of the world if you were to believe Beef, definitely a good choice! We had the bike for two fun-filled hours, in which we (kind of) saw Muenster, albeit through beer goggles, shouted PEDAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAL a lo, particularly when the lights turned green so as to not get caught by another red, and pestered whoever was on bar duty at that point!

ALIM2902I got to play barkeep! I wasn’t very good at it though. Someone asked if I’d done barwork before and I pulled a half pint of froth as an answer. Also did the whole ‘barkeep tells a story about the area’ game, in which I told too many people about the cages at St. Lamberts (see the first Muenster post!), which, as you’ll know from that post, creep me out to no end!

Other fun things that happened on Bierbike:

We got serenaded! TWICE.

ALIM2851Once by some angels and devils who assumed we’d want an English song, being English speakers, until I DEMANDED a German one…

ALIM2864  And once by some dude who sang Country Roads and didn’t understand why no one knew every damn word to the song like he did.

We also picked up some hitchhikers on the way :

ALIM2869 Lazy bastards! Let this be their wall of shame…

So all in all Bierbike = SPASS

School Holidays Rule!

October 23, 2009 Blog No comments

Well I can’t sleep, so I thought this would be a good time to finally update on a bit of what I’ve been up to the past few weeks.

These past two weeks have been the autumn school holidays, so two weeks off! I think one of the bets bits about school were the breaks. Except for when you come to the end of them and you wonder where all that time went… I’m getting that familiar feeling about now as we’ve got to be back in school on Monday!

These past two weeks have been ridiculously full of travelling – I’ve visited Muenster, Mannheim, Heidelberg, Amsterdam and tomorrow I’m going to Bonn and Cologne! Despite Nordrhein-Westfalen not being my first choice when I had to pick the areas I wanted to go to on my Assistantship application, I feel really fortunate that I got placed here. I felt lucky when I found that I’d  been placed in a city, but now that I realise how many great places there are to go to in NRW, I feel luckier still. Mind you, I didn’t spend that much time in NRW last week…

I’ll start where we started the school holidays – over in Muenster! Beef and Gravy are living in the same place now, just 20 minutes drive outside Muenster city centre. I FINALLY bought a camera at their local supermarket, so I can finally take pictures of the places I’ve been! The night out in Muenster was really, really mental. We went to this club called Heaven which was inside of a warehouse on Muenster marina. I got a bit homesick walking towards it, because it reminded me so much of Cardiff Bay!

The next day we got to a little (hungover) exploration of Muenster city centre… I couldn’t believe how pretty Muenster was! Cobbled streets, old timey buildings, old timey font on the signs… It’s definitely a lot prettier than Dortmund is.

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Beef told us that Muenster was rebuilt to look like its former self after it was bombed in the war. I found it to be quaint, almost like something out of a storybook (though that was before I visited Heidelberg, but that’s another blog post). It wasn’t all quaint and cute though. Something freaked me out about St. Lambert’s Church in the city centre.

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It’s a shame it was such a dull day, I’m sure Muenster is stunning in better weather. Anyhow, looks like your standard church right? Look again.

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See the three cages? These are the remains of the Muenster Rebellion – which wikipedia tells me ‘was an attempt by radical Anabaptists to establish a communal theocracy in the German city of Münster.’ Basically, three of the most prominent members of the rebellion were caught, tortured and executed and their remains placed in three cages on the church. As you can see, while the remains aren’t there anymore, the cages still are… how creepy is that??

We only really saw the Old City, had to take shelter in an Italian restaraunt because it started pouring down with rain. We’ll be returning at some point I guess, specially as that’s where Beef and Gravy are living!