Dortmund - Mythical City of the Flying Rhino

The weekend passed with a visit to Dortmund - an overnight stay from Saturday. However, having not been there for over a year, it was interesting to see the leftover World Cup embellishments which were fibre glass seats looking like half-filled footballs punched in from one side.

That, I could well understand, however, dotted around the place were painted sculptures of rhinoceroses with wings – flying pigs, I have seen, probably in my dreams – a flying rhino has to be mythical to the extreme.

I would however surmise that if there can be flying elephants, rhinos might as well fly too, though my slightly analytical brain did reason that the dimension and design of the wings would do more to keep the rhinos on the ground.

If I think back, Berlin for years had sculptures of painted bears all around the town whilst you could only pose with the standing bears, you could sit quite comfortably on the ones crafted to appear on all fours and I did sit on a few watching all sorts of parades around Berlin a few summers ago.

You can do not such thing with the Dortmund Flying Rhinos, none of the locals could clearly indicate what historical, geographical or economical significance the rhinos had with Dortmund, and the cultural part would probably be the logo of the Dortmund Concert Hall.

There are interesting churches and museums around Dortmund, but you would hard-pressed to get any tourist information since the office is closed from 13:00 on Saturday and not open till Monday.

We can basically assume that an industrial town with no particularly interesting features is not in need of a readily available access to tourist information.

Besides the football club Borussia Dortmund which is probably the biggest club in Germany and the Flying Rhino that made it to the fifth floor, you might just ask what I was doing in Dortmund.

However, if there be a local who has much to say about the Mythical City of Dortmund – I am all ears, but I would not be bowing down to this, Golden Rhino.

View the complete Flying Rhino Collection here.