There were several of these large hobby-horse installations in the city, advertising a show jumping event:
No wonder Germany is so good at show jumping if they have it as a spectator sport for ordinary people.
This is St Lambert's Church, as seen down the main street of the old town, the Prinzipalmarkt:
A close-up view shows three cages, in which were kept the leaders of the Münster Rebellion of 1534-1535.
As you may have surmised, the rebellion did not end in success...
This is the rather less pretty cathedral, which had a food market outside it when I was there:
It looks quite new, mainly because it is: it had to be rebuilt following a visit by the US Air Force in 1944.
Here's a white tower:
I've no idea what it is apart from that it's a white tower.
This shop sign uses a rather unfortunate choice of font:
This is the Pinkus-Müller brewery, where we had the conference get-together. It's the only remaining brewery from the 150 or so that used to be in the city:
Obviously I wouldn't have bothered showing you a picture of it if the street hadn't looked so quaint.
This sculpture or whatever it is features a bunch of hands holding stuff:
It was handy in a different way, too, as I could use it as a landmark to find McDonald's.
Here's the town hall, which isn't far from the cathedral:
I took three photos of it but the sun was behind it for the other two. Fortunately, the changeable weather placed a cloud there for me on the third attempt so it didn't show up entirely in silhouette.
One of the streets in the centre has stars on it, each of which is inscribed with a different person's name:
Either Münster is the birthplace of hundreds of celebrities or there's something else going on here.
Several of the churches in the old town have this black-and-white style, in which the towers are dark and the main body is white:
I don't know if it's deliberate or not but it's quite effective.
From the menu of the restaurant we went to after the first day of the conference:
"I don't know what this stuff is, but if we fill it with pork it's sure to be fine."
Excuse me, do you know how far it is from Münster to York?
Ah, OK, thanks.
There are bicycles everywhere in Münster. Here's a mass of them, but it's not unusual: I could have taken the same kind of picture in many side streets.
Of course, if I had done you wouldn't have had the opportunity to think, "hey, he was right about that thing they have with not cleaning church towers".
This is the magnificent Schloss, where our conference was being held:
There was a similar one at the Multi.Player 1 conference in Hohenheim. I rather like the way that Germany handed its old stately homes over to universities, rather than demolish them (which is what we did in the UK in the late 1940s, at the rate of one a week).
This little house was in the grounds of the Schloss:
The reason it was there was because the show jumping competition I mentioned at the start of this post was held in the Schloss's grounds, and this was part of one of the jumps.
The view of the cathedral from inside the Schloss positions the steeple of St Lambert's right between the cathedral's towers:
This reputation Germany has for prowess in engineering goes back a long way...
This sculpture is in the Botanical Gardens at the back of the Schloss:
Yay for science!
This is the view of the Botanical Gardens from inside the Schloss about 20 minutes after I took the previous photo:
Not only is Münster known as the bicycle capital of Germany, it's known as the rain capital of Germany, too. Never fear, though! They have these:
Yes, that's a vending machine for umbrellas. They're €4 each, although shops only charge €2.95.
It looks as if the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster uses the same marketing agency as the University of Essex:
Surely there can't be two agencies producing slogans this bland?
You can always rely on Windows:
No matter where you are in the world, it's always going to do this at some point.
The guys depicted on the War Memorial look to be attacking each other:
That explains a lot.
Finally, here's the view from my hotel room:
That's the Aasee beyond the trees. It's a lake. Given the amount of rain the city gets, if it weren't there now it would be within a week. It's quite pretty, though.
So that's Münster!