Really Long Post

Preface:
This past Thursday, we went to The Hague. This should have been amazing, but our selection of activities was poor, and so it was lame. Poor organization. Also, that had to be the one day I forgot my camera. Shameful. So, no pictures of The Hague. However, I have Fridays off, and I decided to make up for it by getting up and taking the train to Maastricht, reputedly the most beautiful city in The Netherlands. I got there and found it enchanting. Between that and the fact that I could not get into the cave tour I wanted, I decided to stay another day. I did not have my laptop to update anything, but I DID have my camera. So, having taken two days worth of photos, I'm going to present a photographic account of the trip. I've picked just the best ones, and they are in chronological order. I highly recommend clicking on these photos to view the larger versions.


So, on Day 1, I landed in Maastricht in the afternoon. Kind of cloudy, but not raining. I immediately found that the bus system in Maastricht was less complete and more confusing than the one in Utrecht, so I just bought a street map and set off walking. The city actually isn't as big as it looks on the map, it's actually usually only a few kilometers to anywhere you want to go. So, I managed to get around on foot about as swiftly as I could have driven anywhere when I was living in KC.

The above are my first views off the bridge. I walked east from the station, and crossed one of the great big walkways that are scattered up and down the river, which I think is the Maas. So, fairly impressive view from the start. I kept moving at a pretty good clip, because I still hadn't deciphered my map completely, and I wanted to get to the cave tour.
This is a church I ran into while I was lost.
Some other ancient constructions I ran into whilst finding my way. Yeah, this stuff is EVERYWHERE in Maastricht. Even more so than Utrecht, you don't have to go anywhere to find stones piled upon another to make something that is actually older than my whole country. That stuff is everywhere, you just stumble over it. I passed some guided tours, but was still hustling to the caves, so I didn't try to sneak in on one.
Found my way again roughly here, where I recognized a street name. Also, people feeding diverse waterfowl.
That thing there is Fort Saint Peter (Sint Pieter). This was a big part of the impetus for my journey, as there are cavern complexes all underneath the whole area. Around 220 kilometers of them, at minimum. They date back to Roman times, and were both defensive tunnels and actually a sort of quarry. Unfortunately, I discovered two things: The tour in English departs from another site (seriously, 220 km of tunnels, there are several entrances), and I was too late for it. So, off I went back into town.


Still more or less lost at this point. I was looking for a restaurant that my guidebook recommended, called Ginger. Healthy asian food, primarily.

Being lost was pretty much worth it, though.


Figured out roughly where I was when I crashed into the Market Square. Bought a waffle from a street vendor. There is amazing waffle-technology here in The Netherlands, and I've bought some delicious things from streetside waffle-vendors.



I ran into all this stuff on the way to Ginger, the asian noodle place, which it turns out is right next to the University building. The food actually was fantastic (pretty much the best vegetarian noodle dish I've ever had in my life), although I doubt the place actually belongs in "Europe on a Shoestring." I otherwise recommend Lonely Planet's guide highly, but in this case they dropped the ball. I'm not going to go into how much I paid for dinner (it was worth it, I haven't really splurged since I got here,) but I will admit I paid the equivalent of 9 US Dollars for a bowl of Miso Soup to start with. Those of you who go to Japanese restaurants should know that Miso is cheap comfort food - three or four dollars here in the states would be kinda high.

As a side-note, restaurants here won't just bring you a glass of water - if you order water, you get bottled water, so they can charge you for it. In order to defray this expense, I have a big screw-top water bottle on the side of my backpack, which I don't leave home without. I obviously can't whip it out while I'm at the table, but I've found it relatively convenient to refill in bathroom sinks during my daily walkabouts, and this saves me a pretty serious amount of cash.Here's a shot of the side of the university complex, with a statue.


Stumbled back into the park from earlier in the day. Huzzah!


So, I loved the city, and I was disappointed I'd missed the cave tour. I consulted my guidebook, and looked for places to stay overnight. What did I find? The Botel.

This is a relatively inexpensive bed and breakfast that is precisely what it appears to be. Two boats attached together and permanently moored, with water and power and whatnot. The innermost one is a bar, the outer one has rooms below decks. They were so small I actually gave up trying to get a picture of them. However, I didnt' really mind, because I just needed a place to read for a while, and recover myself for the next day. it was clean, even if the bathroom was kinda weird (it was a metal closet with a toilet and a showerhead. There was not really any distinction between standing to urinate, and standing in the shower. I suppose I could have showered whilst emptying my bowels, where I so inclined.)

The only problem is that I hadn't planned to stay overnight. So, I wasn't supplied for such a stopover. This is Europe, so there are no 24-hour wal-mart type installations. Everyplace where I could have bought, e.g., deodorant, was closed by six or so, when I figured out I was going to do this. So, I had to get up the next morning, and run to the HEMA when it opened at nine. Then, swiftly divine which of the many dutch-labelled products were the ones I needed, get back, shower, and clear out of my room in time for breakfast and checking out. I made it just fine. However, I ended up with a green tea exfoliating body scrub. This is actually fine with me (luxurious, if the label is to be believed), but my head is shaved, so I generally just use whatever soap I have instead of shampoo. This resulted in me picking sand out of my scalp for the entire rest of the day. Meh.
But, I had a lovely breakfast, which strengthened me for the march back out of town, pictured above. They even served a boiled egg in one of those little egg cups, still in the shell, which I had to sort of reverse-engineer how to eat. I...probably didn't do it right, but at the end there was shell in the cup and no egg, so I'm going to call that sufficient for this barbaric Colonial. One of my professors was kind enough the other day to show me how to hold a knife and fork and use it properly, which I believe I am catching on to. It's sort of awkward at first, but I know I'm eating more slowly, so there are probably benefits other than just "not looking really rude."

Anyway, as shown above, I got back out of town, and then set off on a cross-country trek of maybe a mile or so to get to the correct site.



Found it! I had a really excellent tour guide. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to take pictures of a cave with a typical pocket camera. I'm hoping that against the black background, these show up okay. I had to exclude most of them as hopelessly obscured. The problem is that a flash just isn't going to illuminate a thirty-fourty foot high ceiling.

Essentially what happened here is that they mined out the stone, and just kept going. The scale is already cyclopean - and there's apparently another one in Belgium where the ceilings are about sixty meters high, they got in so deep. That's nearly two hundred feet. I don't know if I'll be able to make it there, but if I do we can pretty much give up on getting pictures.

There are effectively endless galleries of this. It's beautiful, in an austere way, but you do NOT want to get separated from the group. They also used to grow mushrooms down here, and sometimes make weird artwork.
When the US and Canada liberated Maastricht from the Nazis, there wasn't actually much of a fight. This place was kind of an afterthought, and I'm given to understand that there were a few sputters and then a surrender. However, the natives nonetheless all took shelter down here at that time. There was plenty of room, I guess. They constructed a church down there, for the times when they had to live here for a while. I couldn't get a good photo of the altar, but there were large stations of the cross done in charcoal, which won't dissolve when water seeps through the rock.


There was a girl who was born down there during the ten days, and she was baptized in that church. As a cute postscript, she twenty years later insisted on being married at the same altar.

Okay, that was day two. At this point, my feet where killing me. I nonetheless managed to dredge myself back to the train station and get home, where I have since been nursing a bumper crop of blisters. I suppose Nature will provide me with the necessary callouses very soon. In the meantime, I actually found myself missing Trixie while on the journey, something I thought would be impossible.