Maastricht

More and more I’m becoming convinced that if you decide to come to Europe, France is the very last place you want to visit, and you may in fact want to head to Belgium twice instead of France once.

We started out today at 7am and headed to the high speed train. Where we found, yet again, that we had no seat. Or so we thought.

The matter nearly ended in a fist fight between me and four Parisian girls, but luckily for me a diplomatic Parisian man pointed out there were more seats in a separate compartment in the back, where, sure enough, our seats were. The rest of the trip went swimmingly.

Our hotel is nice, but the heat doesn’t work. We don’t feel like moving all our stuff tonight, but we have another room set for tomorrow night.

The good thing about the hotel is that Beth’s hospital is literally across the street. The bad part is that the nearest restaurant is miles away. The other good thing though is that there is a bus that goes by rather frequently. Though…the other bad thing is that the internet costs 11 Euros for 24 hours and breakfast costs 20 Euros.

We had lunch at the hotel restaurant, due to a lack of options, and had an ok and rather costly meal. Exactly what you’d expect at a hotel.

For dinner, we walked. And walked. Into the wind. The cold wind. And found our way into the central part of town. However, we did find an excellent Italian restaurant.

One cool thing about Maastricht (Netherlands), is that they have a street, then a separate street for bikes and motorcycles, and a sidewalk. The bikes even have their own lights.

And even in this friendly town, we proved yet again that we are the most approachable people on the planet. On the way home we got asked something (directions or the time or something) by two different people who spoke Dutch.

Maybe I should get an eye patch and a gold tooth to help discourage all this friendliness…