My class schedule for September - October is brilliant, as I have 1.5 hours of class Thursday evening and 1.5 Friday morning, which equates to basically a 6-day weekend. So last week I thought I should take advantage of this and travel somewhere close-by, but not as... well.. Dutch as Amsterdam. I looked on a map and Maasticht seemed pretty damn far away so I booked a train ticket.
Josh decided to come with me so we took the 2+ hour train and ended up in a really pretty, and fairly non-Dutch seeming city. It's right on the Belgian and German border, and Josh had read that the people in Maastricht were more friendly and lighthearted due to the proximity to Germany (... actually). Maastricht is a really beautiful city, with lots of medieval structures and some gorgeous buildings, and as there's a University in Maastricht there were lots of cool restaurants and student bars as well. We ended up at a British-style Quiz Night with some Canadian and US army guys on the first night, which was pretty fantastic.
Also quite pretty
Prettiest!
Sort of pretty I guess
I took many pictures so I've made an album on Flickr that anyone who might be slightly interested can check out:
The first day we wandered around the city and became slightly obsessed with this red tower. It looked like it was painted with blood and it turns out it actually was, originally. Ox blood, not the blood of Maastricht's enemies as we had thought, but still pretty cool and while they no longer paint with real blood they make a special shade of "ox blood red" paint to retouch it with.
We decided we needed to climb it, and it turns out it is in fact climb-able but the entrance was closed by the time we got to it on day one. On day 2 we returned, bright and early in the morning ready to get up to the top, but there was a very fancy doctors-getting-called-to-the-doctor-bar ceremony going on for apparently all day, and we didn't want to crash it to attempt to find the stairs. It was a very disappointing morning, but instead of going home to cry we decided to rally, trek up a hill and go check out a system of underground tunnels we had heard were pretty cool.
We got distracted on the way to the tunnels by many cute animals.
Goats are the best ones.
They make me exceptionally happy.
Small children also like feeding animals, apparently.
We finally got to the tunnels and decided to take a tour as the lady selling tour tickets basically told us we would die cold and alone under the streets of Maastricht if we went in by ourselves. So we joined up:
Entrance to the scary cave
Spooky, scary!
A map of the tunnels
The tunnels were really cool, and apparently the second-largest network of underground tunnels after those built by the vietcong. That's about all I can tell you about them as the tour was completely in Dutch and after the first five minutes the guide basically stopped translating to English for us. Sometimes she'd remember and after giving a 10-minute speech about a certain part of the tunnels she'd say "oh.. yes this is a, uh, carving". It was fine though, we were the only two non-Dutch speakers on the tour which was actually kind of cool compared to Amsterdam where basically everyone doing anything touristy is American or British. I was able to make out the words "Napoleon", "nazis" and "Mickey Mouse", so apparently the tunnels have seen a lot of action.
After the tunnels and some other wandering on day 2 Josh and I decided to head back to the hostel to have a quick nap before heading back into town for the evening. This trip was somewhat momentous for me as until then I had never stayed in a real hostel while travelling, only hotels or "hostels" with private rooms and no other people in them. After the first day I was pretty impressed with the whole experience. I didn't take any pictures of the hostel but you can check out its website here. It was really bright and spacious with a cool bar/lounge/games area, and the rooms were clean with a private shower and toilet. At first I was surprised/disappointed there were no towels, soaps, hairdryers, etc., but quickly realized being upset about that while paying 25 euro a night would make me a complete princess/douche, so I shut up about it.
While I have no complaints about the hostel itself, I still think I'm going to stick to hotels when I travel from now on since even at the nicest hostel you can end up rooming with a sketchy random, which is preciesly what happened with us. When Josh and I got back to the hostel there was this dude standing in front of the door to our room and just staring at it. We kind of walked in front of him and went inside, and he followed us in. When I asked sketcho if he was staying in the room he kind of looked at me blankly for a minute and then said "... yeah". He proceeded to come in, stand in the middle of the room for a minute, pick up his laptop and lock himself in the shower room. The shower room is literally just a shower with a door, nowhere to sit or put a laptop or anything. He was still in there when we woke up from our nap like 2 hours later.
Josh and I went back into town for some wandering, drinking wine on the street, tapas-eating and impromptou bluegrass viewing:
A pretty Maastrichtian square
So much tapas!
I liked this statue a lot
You can't tell from the video but they were actually very talented and adorable.
It was a pretty lovely night. It was marred, however, by Sketchbag McGee at the hostel deciding to come home at about 2am, lock himself in the bathroom again and listen to music on his computer at full blast until about 5.30. He then went to bed, woke up again at like 6.45 and kept walking out of the room, slamming the door every time, then coming in and staring at his pile of luggage before repeating the process. Needless to say I didn't get any sleep and that combined with an absolute gongshow journey home in which I was forced to change trains 3 times only to end up 3.5 hours later at the destination I would have arrived at had I stayed on the first one, tainted my Maastricht memories slightly. But overall it was a really fun little trip and has definitely got me anxious to do some more travelling a bit farther afield.
I also realize I haven't yet written anything about my actual life in the Netherlands except ranting about my hatred of Chipkaarts (I forgot to swipe again last week. So much hate), so my next post will be about my actual Amsterdamian (well, Amstelveenian) student existence. Stay tuned.
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