Lockdown Day 23 - Remembering the Leeds Rose

Last October, we had a holiday in Germany. Once the places we visited was Dortmund, which is the twin city of my home town of Leeds, Yorkshire, and one of the ways in which this is commemorated is in the Dortmund Westfalenpark with a Rose Garden.

Now, at the end of October, the roses are just about coming to the end, but we found that the rose garden was set out with a low hedge in the shape of a Yorkshire rose, with a commemorative sign explaining about the twinning of the two cities.

Luckily, we found a couple of the roses still flowering.

They seem to make a little bit more of the twinning in Dortmund than Leeds seem to do. In the centre of the city there is Platz von Leeds with the Leeds coat of arms on the side of a building. In Leeds there is Dortmund Square with a statue of a chap holding a beer barrel (Dortmund has renowned breweries) but there's no sign in Leeds to indicate what the statue is or even that you are in Dortmund Square.

You have to pay to go in the Westfalenpark, which seems quite odd for a city park - at least in terms of what we experience in England - and you can't go out and come back in even if you have a ticket, you would have to pay twice! This rather put a hole in our plans as we were planning on walking through the park to an English speaking church service then returning to the park in the afternoon. So, we spent all day in the park, which wasn't too much of a hardship, there are nice grounds and lake and indeed a nice cafe in the middle of it, as well as a miniature railway for children. In the summer there would have been a cable car too and other attractions but they were closed for the winter.