Auf Wiedersehen, Au revoir, Vaarwel

Well, and with that we are sitting in the gate area in Charles de Gaul waiting for our flight back to the states!

Our last couple of days in Europe were pretty chill. Michael's LIGO conference was a success - he managed to corner all of the people he needed to talk to and got a few hiring sniffs. It was also nice to hang out with Scott for a little bit, and we met a bunch of his friends from Northwestern and U Chicago. I made a little bit of progress on my paper (I know what I'm doing on the plane) and also enjoyed walking around a bit more. I noted that there are a lot of churches in Maastricht, and I toured a couple of them on the last day. St Catherine's cathedral was rather impressive, and one gorgeous old cathedral was turned into a bookstore!

One more shot of the river Maas and St Severius' bridge.

St Catherines's Cathedral

The ambiance really went for somber darkness pierced by hundreds of candles. It was quite beautiful.

The outside was fairly imposing, too. It was a nun's monastery, so I guess they were well cloistered.

What's this, yet another church yard?

Nope, a very pretty (and busy) bookstore!

The ceiling wasn't well maintained, but you could see that there used to be (presumably impressive) frescos on the ceiling. Apparently during the heyday of Calvinistic Protestantism, this church was shut down by the state. Much more recently it was privately bought and turned into a bookstore and partially restored; some of the proceeds go to restoration.

It's a little bit bittersweet to be on the last leg - this trip has been excellent, but after three weeks away we're both also ready to back in our own home. I'm excited to see how my plants did under neighborly supervision, and I think Michael is looking forward to being able to better keep his work email inbox a bit more under control (if such a thing is possible). There are still a lot of things I'd like to do in Europe (we did not make it to Germany or Amsterdam this trip...) but that just means there will be future installments on this blog!

Love to all!

Lazy river, busy conference

The last two days in Maastricht have been quite nice. Michael has had a few busy days at the conference - he gave his talk, co-wrote another one, and is currently moderating a session, so he's got plenty to do! It's being a really productive meeting for him, and he's getting a lot of good career type advice and making some good connections, so the responsibility seems to be worth it.

I, on the other hand, have had a much slower pace. I spent most of Tuesday in the university library, and walking around the town a little bit. Today I went for a walk to the south of town and found a nature reserve with a bunch of trails along the river and marshlands. The river breaks into a number of little channels with a bunch of islands, and they're all connected with footbridges.

We've also been hanging out the Scott and his friends from Northwestern and Chicago, who are all very nice. They seem determined to taste every flavor of gelato available in the city, which is quite the quest, but I can't say that hasn't been fun tagging along!

The (rebuilt) original bridge - the first one from the 1300s was bombed during WWII.

I'm not a very big fan of geese... and these ones were really big.

A quaint tour boat. There are also transportation barges going up and down, so the river seems to be well trafficked.

I wanted the white butterfly to land on the purple flowers, but this was a nice shot, too.

So many flowers.

The nature reserve was a series of mini islands connected by foot bridges, and it was quite lovely.

Although very sunny. This is looking back up the river towards the city.

Maastricht!

We're now on the last leg of our European tour round 3, in Maastricht, the Netherlands. It has been fascinating so far, so buckle up!

We took an early morning train on Sunday from Paris, with a short stop over in Liege, Belgium. The whole trip was much faster than I expected it to be - after all, we were traveling across an entire country. In all it was about 4 hours, including our hour to walk around Liege. We didn't get to see very much of Liege - the train station was on the edge of town and we didn't want to wander far, but what we did see was very pretty. There were lots of sail boats on the river and a big cabled pedestrian bridge that gave a nice view more into town. Depending on how close I get to finishing the paper draft I've supposed to been completing on this trip, I/we might make a trip back down to explore more, since it's only about 30 minutes away. Or maybe hop over to Cologne, or maybe all the way up to Amsterdam. We'll see. I must be honest, because I really haven't prepared for this part of the trip. I'd done basically no research about what there was to see or do here, so we were starting off a little bit blind. That has made it actually quite fun, because there is an element of discovery to everything!

Our last dinner in Paris with family - excellent company and excellent food!

The train station in Liege had a lot of lines.

The river in Liege

 And boy has there been much to discover! It turns out that this kind of random university town has a very rich history. The more you know! As our hotel room wasn't quite ready for check in when we arrived, we just walked around the town for a while. Maastricht is interesting as an American tourist, because it is a small city, especially compared to our previous destinations, but it still has a very long history that is apparent just walking around its streets. I don't think that's usually the case in the States.

Here is a map in case you are a clueless American like me and don't/didn't actually know where Maastricht is, or that the Netherlands has this little tail that dips south between Belgium and Germany.

The River Maas. I'm not sure how I haven't yet taken a picture of the bridge that I was standing on to get this one... it's the original bridge, and was just called "The Bridge" from when it was the only one in the 1300s). I'll remember to get a picture tomorrow.

Much of Maastricht are these cobble paved pedestrian/bike streets. Cycling is most definitely a thing here.

We walked around Maastricht for a while before our hotel room was ready, and got stopped by this religious parade. I found it pretty interesting - there were lots of different parishes, each with their patron saint and/or relic piece. At least, I think that's what was going on.

Apparently this only happens ever seven years, and it's kind of a thing that Maastricht is famous for, if you are into the pilgrimage thing, I guess. I'm a little confused because when googling this, the official parade happened in June and there was nothing mentioned about september, but it was clearly a very serious thing.

It was a very long procession... it looked like it went on much longer than what we stuck around for. It was lead by a marching band, and had a few hymn-singing choirs, and then lots of these statues and trunks.

For a country in which Catholicism was banned for a while, there sure are a lot of catholic churches. I guess Maastricht has been a pilgrimage site for centuries because of St Servatius...although I'm not clear on who he was. I think this is his church.

We found the natural history museum tucked away in a very cute part of the old town. We didn't really expect much of it, and it was also entirely in Dutch, but it ended up being really really cool!

Tricks with light!

Duck faces with the duck bill. Maastricht is on top of pretty extensive limestone deposits, which are excellent fossil beds, and so there is a great paleontology group associated with the museum, turns out. Yay rocks!

There are lots of pretty little river crossings. There are two rivers that meet in Maastricht, so lots of bridges and walks along banks.

The walk along the river is very cute. Go beavers!

More bridges.

This morning we decided to do some googling for things to do and see in Maastricht. We found out that there are 200 km of quarried out tunnels under Maastricht (stretching far into Belgium as well) along with an old defensive fort on the south side of town, with a guided tour in English! (Dutch is a very weird language). That ended up being a fascinating.

Looking up at the fort. It was built in the early 1700s on a hill overlooking the city to try to prevent the french from overrunning the town (again - the plans for the fort were actually designed by a french general who captured the city and wanted to reinforce it against being recaptured, but it didn't get built until after the french withdrew. )

The interior side of some of the second story cannon houses.

One of the (theoretically) working cannons.

Sitting on top of the fort, overlooking the city. The cement bit is a machine gun bunker/weather station installed during WWII.

After touring the fort, we headed under ground to visit the tunnels.

Down we go!

All the tunnels are entirely man made, as people dug out the limestone for building. There are lots of drawing and inscriptions all through it. This is relatively modern (the city had local artists come through and illustrate some of the city's history to up the touristy element of the cave) and shows old temples to the roman goddess Vesta, goddess of fire. The city was originally founded as a roman outpost. The guide stopped here to talk about the importance of the undying flames in the city temples, and to remind us that we would get lost and possibly never found again if we wandered off by ourselves without light.

It was incredibly mazelike. At one part of the tour, our guide had us all put our right hands on the walls, then took all our lights and went ahead around a corner so we could experience the total darkness. We had to walk following the wall. It was really trippy, and rather disorienting. You could hear everyone talking, but had no sense of distance at all. Fortunately we didn't have to go very far, but I would not want to get lost in here! (It was clearly all a very controlled experience -  I don't think the particular section we were in had any offshoots or anything and we would have been found very quickly!)

Michael volunteered to carry one of the lanterns - no loosing the light for us!

Just more pictures of the tunnels

Apparently you grow chicory in the pitch black, otherwise it gets even more bitter?!?? And it's so humid in the caves you only have to water it once when you plant it??

A map of the tunnel systems. We were exploring a little area roughly where the guide's light is. It's extensive.

In the 1770s, quarry worker came across a jawbone that was about a meter long with 10 inch teeth. At the time, no body knew what to make of a sea monster skeleton under a hill in the neatherlands, but it was the influencial specimen that allowed people to come up with the concept of animals before our time, and eventually evolution. So really, paleontology was kind of born here. There have been five more mosasaurus skeletons found, including a nearly complete one that we saw in the natural history museum. But since we couldn't read dutch we didn't quite get the whole picture at the museum.

At one point the french tried to blow up the fort above us by infiltrating the tunnels and packing in a lot of gunpowder. Unfortunately for them it wasn't enough to blast through the 10 m of limestone, and they were off in the calculations a bit because the fort was actually a few hundred meets down a different tunnel.

Having fun!

For dinner, we met up with Michael's brother Scott, who is also in town for the LIGO/VIRGO conference, and had a nice time out with a few other LIGO people. This conference seems to be taking over the town, because we ran into different groups of people that either Michael or Scott knew for the rest of the evening.

So that's the first two days! Looking forward to the rest!

It's a double update!

Saturday is our last day in Paris, and we're making the most of it. We spent a few hours in the Louve this morning, which could clearly use several days worth of exploration. We were also pleasantly surprised that at 9:30 on a Saturday morning the crowds were still quite thin, and most of the galleries we wandered through were pretty empty.

Excited to do something touristy!

Some stately ladies

Venus. In all honestly, not quite sure why this is such a famous masterpiece compared to all the other amazing marble statues. But it certainly is lovely.

I was that crazy person taking pictures of the walls.

And the floors. So much beautiful Marble!

Writing sets from 3000 years ago... I was amazed that there was still ink medium in the pallet.

"Stand under the statue Michael." "But it has creepy eyes..."

Michael likes pillows, but maybe not the Ancient Egyptian version.

You need a big building for some of these paintings.

"The Astronomer" by Vermeer and Coughlin.

"The Lacemaker", by Vermeer, which is also surprisingly fitting.

We had a snack on the terrace with a nice view and lots of yellow jackets.

So six years ago when we last came to Paris, we took this selfie with the Mona Lisa, not realizing that Michael's head was right in front of the painting. It was also much more crowded and we hightailed it out of the chaos.

This time we did better. Still lots of people, but we are older and wiser.

Michael also managed some other good picture selfies.

Louve Visit round two a success!

We are about to head out to meet up with family - Uncle Kevin, Aunt Vero, Clement, Eliott and Noe, and Aunt Kristen are all in town. So it'll be a nice reunion. Then we leave tomorrow morning for Maastrict, Netherlands!