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!