James Tucker in Cov

Utrecht is the last place I visited on my recent trip to the Netherlands. It's about 45 minutes from Amsterdam by train, and is a smallish university town, though I think bigger than Leiden. The quieter residential area can be seen top left, though a lot of this has been taken over for university departments and the like (they have almost buried the canal there, but you can still boat in it). It has a fairly well-done new shopping area to one side of the old town (old town, right), and seems like a pretty lively place. The old town does really well by the university, with some really great nightlife and local stores. A lot of the restaurants and clubs have extended basements that stretch under the road to the river, so they have patios on mutiple levels- you can sort of see that in the picture above right.
Apparently, Utrecht went to war with Amsterdam a couple of times in the middle ages, and one of Amsterdam's towers today has an inscription mocking their smaller neighbour. Utrecht used to be pretty heavily fortified in the 18th C., and the remains of the city walls are still visible in some of the parks. Like Leiden, Utrecht has a huge, half-built church, though this one was finished before a hurricane (!) knocked part of it down. The part that's been saved has had the open face bricked up (below left). The main tower stands some distance from the Choir, with a square in between that still shows the old church floorplan (there are old gravestones, pillar bases etc- below centre). Like in Amsterdam and Leiden, the carillon, in the main tower, seems to be pretty important, playing a different tune every hour that can be heard anywhere in the old town. From a number of angles (below right) it's actually hard to notice that there's a chunk of the church missing. Except of course that most churches don't have trees growing out their sides.
Also, for some unclear reason, there is a UFO crashed into one of the newer office buildings.