This year we wanted to spend christmas and new years somewhere with sun and not the icky and drab weather of Münster at that time. So we went to Gran Canaria, Puerto de Mogan, a lovely little town in the south of Gran Canaria. Sure, it's a touristy place, but devoid of those ugly thousand-guests-palaces they build as hotels over the coast on that island, with a little harbour, a (artificial, of course) lagoon and nice apartment buildings for tourists to stay. Very relaxing days.

We had no idea what little jewel of a town was just an hour with the train away. Soest has a lovely old town with a large part of the old city walls still there, lots of old buildings and fascinating churches. It has interesting history, too due to it's position as one of the major westphalian cities during the Hanse (actually Lubeck was founded by - among others - merchants from Soest, and the Soest' city rules were exported to many cities in the baltic area due to that during the Hanse time) and the cities decision to switch to the protestant faction during reformation has some really interesting situations with the large cathedral buildings in Soest beeing protestant (which is quite rare in Westphalia). Spent a great time there and had lots of fun exploring Soest.