We’re in Germany tonight, Münster to be precise.
We drove here after this morning’s Little Gym session in order to sample the atmosphere of another German city’s Weihnachtsmarkt.
It turns out to be an attractive, vibrant little town, although I’m not entirely certain we ever left the Netherlands. I distinctly remember driving across the border and seeing the signs change from Dutch to German, but on the basis of the people walking around here, I have to wonder.
It seems as if one in two people speaks Dutch around town. Even before they’ve opened their mouth, you can identify a group of people as Dutch from the young men in the group. They all have that same tell-tale bad hair. You know; where great care and even greater quantities of hair gel have been applied to achieve a look of cruel disarray.
Dutch men and their hair gel: what can you say? It’s so embarrassing and pitiful that I’ve been able to pick otherwise anonymous Dutch men out of a crowd on the other side of the world. I’m honestly not joking. No other nation in the world has placed its future in the hands of men with such daft hair. It’s so bad that it makes you want to take them aside and tell them. You think they mustn’t really know how daft they look. It’s as if they’re walking around with their flies undone. You cringe and blush on their behalf.
But I digress.
The Christmas market is good. All of the usual stuff is here, everything from bee’s wax candles to wooden puzzles, from olive wood carvings to Christmas books; all of it accompanied by fairground rides, lashings of piping-hot Glüwein, suggestive-looking bratwurst and downright lewd Krakauers; not to forget the rice-pudding with cinnamon and sugar. Yum.
We haven’t actually bought anything (except food) yet, but it’s been fun looking around. Mostly fun, that is. It’s extremely busy here and pushing the pram across squares filled to capacity can take several minutes instead of ten seconds. Seriously, it wouldn’t do to be claustrophobic here. Hopefully, the crowds will be fewer in the morning.
We had dinner at a really nice Spanish restaurant that was positively hopping with customers. The food was excellent and the service was attentive. Eloïse seemed to have a good time, too.
Our hotel’s just outside of the old town. Most of the hotels we called a week ago were booked solid, so we had to take what we could find. It’s pretty good, though. There’s free wireless Internet, a TV that gets Nederland 2 and even CNN if you’re desperate, and the room doesn’t smell.
The bed is interesting. When I put pressure on the mattress earlier on, it sank in the middle, so I inspected the frame and discovered several slats displaced and lying on the floor. We’d have sunk through the middle if we’d tried sleeping on it in that state. I pulled off the mattress and literally had to make the bed this evening, which is a first. Still, the free Internet access makes up for everything.
We’ll spend more time ambling around here tomorrow, perhaps buy a couple of things, then head back to Amsterdam in the afternoon. Sadly, there’s no decent autobahn along the route, so you’d hardly know that we were in the last bastion of the unconstrained cruiser. So, it’ll be pretty much all 100 – 120 kmh back to Mokum.