They really do have (well sort of) hills in the Netherlands

I headed into Maastricht in the late afternoon. The train goes via a little town called Heerlen and strangely it is really obvious when you cross the border into the Netherlands. There is something different about the buildings and the way the place looks. The biggest difference was, though, that it wasn’t bucketing rain in the Netherlands (it was still freezing cold).

I arrived in Maastricht and set off for the hostel. Luckily the old town is easy to find from the station as you pretty much walk in a straight line out the front doors and keep going until you hit the Vrijthof. I didn’t want to go that far and stopped once I reached the other side of the bridge. I was a bit confused by the bridges. The tourist map outside the station only shows three bridges but there are actually four bridges over the river. The narrow pedestrian only bridge is new. I headed down the river bank to the hostel which is near the last of the bridges in town and checked in. Maastricht was the first place that I had been where the hostels were really busy and there were three others in my room. I dropped everything off and picked a bed before heading into town to find somewhere to eat and to have a quick look around since it wasn’t raining.

While getting to the old town is easy, getting around it isn’t. Normally heading in the general direction of something like a church tower gets you where you want to go but that doesn’t quite work in parts of Maastricht. The streets turn in on themselves a bit and you somehow seem to come out not all that far from where you started. I managed to make it to the Vrijthof though which is the main square next to the St Servaas and St Jan churches. It’s really very pretty and has lots of trees so must be beautiful in summer. One side is dominated by the two churches and two other sides are full of cafes and restaurants. I suspect that none of them are brilliant but all of them are not bad as they were pretty full on the Friday and Saturday night and at this time of the year it is mostly Dutch people around. I took some photos of the sunset behind the church and the other buildings and then continued to walk around. I headed back over the bridge briefly in my search to find somewhere to eat but didn’t find anything that looked right. I must say that the restaurant scene in Maastricht is most definitely pricey and seems to be aimed mostly at couples. Almost all the restaurants that I looked into had tables for two and cosy lighting and there is nothing worse than sitting by yourself in a restaurant like that.

In the end I had something at the kebab shop on one end of the Vrijthof and it wasn’t bad (though it also wasn’t cheap). Oh by the way if you are looking for an ATM in the old town they are pretty much all in the one street next to the McDonalds on the corner of the Vrijthof. I spent ages looking for one and then found four!

The next day, despite the shocking weather forecast, it actually turned out to be quite a nice day and even got slightly warm at one point in the afternoon. I decided to try and see most of the sights that I could and take advantage of the sun. I started with Helpoort because it is closest to the hostel. It’s the oldest town gate left in the Netherlands and has quite a decent length of town wall still attached to it. There is actually quite a bit of town wall left in the southern part of the old town. Some of it has been incorporated into other buildings but some is still left free. I entered through the gate into the maze of streets to the south of the main old town and just wandered. I came across some old churches that are now used for other things and a waterwheel that runs a mill attached to a bakery. You can hear the water from a couple of streets away when it’s quiet. I wandered past the quite flash and quite extensive University buildings  which seem to fill much of the western part of the old town and came out next to St Jan’s. Unfortunately the church is being renovated at the moment so you can’t go into it at all and over 50% of the famous red tower is covered in scaffolding. If you stand really close and tip the camera a lot you can just get a picture with just the tower. I walked around St Servaas as the entrance isn’t on Vrijthof but in the opposite corner to St Jan’s where the old cloister used to be. It’s nearly 4 euros to go into St Servaas and this also includes the treasury and a small booklet about the church and it’s history.

I’d never heard of St Servaas (AKA St Severitus) so I assume he is a local area type saint. He was a bishop in Maastricht in the 4^th century and I have no idea what his miracles were. The initial building on the site was from the 11^th century but was added to extensively in the 13^th century. It was made a basilica in 1985 (the Pope must have wanted a weekend in Holland). It was quite a wealthy church as lots of kings and bishops came to visit over the years. I suspect many were on their way to Aachen which would have been about a day’s ride away.

The Schatzkammer has quite an extensive collection of goodies in several rooms. The underground section shows a set of graves that were uncovered when they were working on the church. They also have a large collection of fabrics from the 10^th and 11^th centuries that were used in reliquaries. They have a painting of Jesus’ family with his family tree next to it (this seems to be a popular theme in the area because there was a similar one in Aachen). I had no idea that John the Baptist was Jesus’ second cousin and that St Anna was married three times, and had three daughters all called Maria. Some of the apostles were also related to them through his aunts. They also have the usual collection of reliquaries upstairs in an old chapel. I’m disappointed by the lack of mummified hands and tongues on display in Northern Germany though. If you are going to have a relic, you might as well have a good one.

The entrance to the church is through a 12^th century door that used to be used by the brothers in the abbey and brings you in near the entrance to the crypt. The crypt contains the graves of various bishops including St Servaas and the stairs have been almost worn away by the number of pilgrims visiting the church.

Unfortunately, much of the older decoration of the church has been removed or remodeled in more recent centuries. The gothic statues seem to have been coated with something very plasticky and now they remind me of those bleeding heart Jesus lights from the 50s and 60s. Some of the windows are lovely though. There is one window left from the original set of stained glass and it’s the tiny window above a door at the back of the church.

The Royal Entrance to the church is really stunning and you can actually view it through glass from the outside of the church. If you pay your money and go in, you can walk through the entrance and see it up close. It’s early French gothic but has had work done in the 19^th century. That’s when the mosaic on the floor is from too. It’s a giant maze with Jerusalem in the middle and the four major cities around the edge. Something about the only way to heaven being through St Servaas or something like that.

The statues around the walls are of various prophets and saints. Poor old Simeon who is on the right side of the door was mistaken for Mary in the 19^th century renovation and painted as a girl.

Back inside there is a old Romanesque section of the roof decoration that has been brought inside for protection. The rest of the church is nothing special really.

On the way out it is worth stopping in the little chapel near the entrance that is also dedicated to St Servaas. It’s quite dark inside but the windows are really lovely.

I headed back out into the streets and made my way through to the town hall square. It’s easy to find as the town hall has a huge tower on it. I past an old church that is now a bookshop on the way (it’s just off the Vrijthof). They have preserved the main structure of the church and just lined the place with books. It was really busy inside. They must be a very good bookstore.

The town hall is completely surrounded by the old market place and there were still little stalls there. They mostly were selling snacks, meat, cheese and flowers. On one corner of the square is a statue of the man who invented gas lighting and he is holding a naked flame. Strikes me as a recipe for trouble but maybe they turn it off at night time. I continued north of the square but there really wasn’t much to see so I turned around and came back through the market place to the tourist information office. While there are very few useful brochures and you have to pay to get a map, the people at the office are very helpful and speak perfect English. I asked about Fort St Peter as I was interested in going but unfortunately it doesn’t start opening again until April. It then opens only on the weekends until June. And the tours are only in Dutch except for in July and August. There was another woman there asking about the cave tours which run from next door to the fort and they are running again on the weekends but also only in Dutch. I decided to think about whether to bother and headed out to find somewhere to get some lunch. The Dutch aren’t as big on bakeries as the Germans so it’s quite hard to find one. Most German street will have at least on and you’ll often be able to stand still and see three or four of them. I did find one in the end though and grabbed some lunch and continued on to the fort.

It’s on a ‘hill’ behind the town and it seems like quite a way up but I don’t think it really is. You can see quite a way though. The fort is easy to see as about 10 years ago they cleared the land around it again and repaired what was left of the buildings. The area around the fort is really pretty and is true countryside even though it’s only just 25 minutes walk from the centre of town. There are several walking tracks in the area up to about 10km. It seems to be a popular place to bring your dog for a walk on the weekend. I was surprised by the number of people who had come to the caves and there was quite a crowd when I arrived. I had spotted the woman from the tourist office and decided that at least we could both have no idea of what was going on. The tours are running twice a day at the moment on the weekends and Wednesday and Friday. During the peak season they run much more frequently and also in English. At the moment it’s just Dutch at 11 and Dutch at 2pm. There were so many of us that they split the group into 2 before we entered the caves. Now I use the term caves loosely here. What I went and saw is actually a man made set of tunnels and chambers that have been produced over many centuries as they have mined sandstone for use in buildings and in the production of concrete. Building quality stone is quite hard to come by in the Netherlands (given that most of the country is almost (or actually) below sea level so they were quite keen to get all that they could from the hills around Maastricht (not far from Maastricht is actually the highest point in the whole of the Netherlands). The stone isn’t of the highest quality though so it is often just used for facades and the structural part of the building is made of bricks.

The men used to work in the fields during the summer and then in the winter when there wasn’t much to do on the farms, they would go underground and mine stone. They lived down there for days at a time and they had even built little sleeping quarters, kitchens and pit toilets. It was actually quite pleasant inside at 11 degrees year round and not too damp. It was probably nicer than on the surface. After centuries of mining, there were nearly 200 km of tunnels in the area around and under Maastricht. Several sections of that have now collapsed inside and there is only 70km of tunnels left.

They have found several fossilised dinosaurs in the sandstone in Maastricht including the Mosasaurus which is named after the river in town .It’s a large fish like thing that lived there when the whole of the area was under the ocean.

At various points in time the tunnels were used as a refuge during times of war and they even had a hospital in one of the other sets. They used to be a popular site for camping also in the 20^th century and that’s when most of the drawings and graffiti were done. Napoleon has written his name in there somewhere though.

They even use the tunnels for growing mushrooms as it’s nice and dark and the temperature is constant year round. The caves are also home to a colony of bats but we didn’t see any. I guess they steer clear of where they are going to be tourists with torches.

After the tour, Lillian and I headed back into town. We passed through the little animal park which is on the edge of town near the old wall. It has deer and goats and chickens and ducks (and I feel many other birds that have just moved in for the food). They all seem very tame and I suspect that if you offered food you would be able to pat them.

We wandered around the main part of town for a while and then started to look for something to eat as Lillian had to catch the train back to Amsterdam. We ended up in a little Italian place on the new side of town which was nice but really quite expensive. There is no way I’d pay that much for that meal at home.

The next morning it was pouring with rain when I got up so I had a very slow start to the day and didn’t leave the hostel until after midday. And then it was only because I was getting hungry and didn’t have any food. I headed over to the museum which is on the bank of the river opposite the hostel. There is a café in the ground floor called Ipanema and the food was really good. It seems like a popular place to go for coffee on a Sunday too. The cakes looked awesome but I resisted. After my sandwich, I had no room left anyway.

I got a museum card from the desk at the museum. These are a great thing if you are travelling around the Netherlands for any great length of time and intend on visiting some museums. You pay the one off price of between 35 and 40 euros (the museums charge a handling fee for organizing the card for you) and this gets you into 400 hundred museums around the country for free for a whole year. Given that the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is 11 euros by itself, it’s a pretty good deal. You only have to go to 5 museums and you’ve got your money back. They have a booklet in the museum which lists all the ones covered by the card (I’d tried using the website but it’s only in Dutch and there isn’t a list just a search function which I can’t get to work properly.) but it pretty much includes all of the major museums in the country.

Anyway, I then headed upstairs into the exhibitions. The first floor covers historic art and the upper two cover modern art in a series of changing exhibitions. Unfortunately half of the historic section is closed at the moment for renovations but the half that is open is really good. It’s called Palazzo and covers Italian art from the gothic and renaissance periods. It became fashionable in the early 20^th century in Holland to collect Italian art and have it on display in your house. They have some photos of the houses where some of the collection comes from and they just have reliquary bust sitting on the mantle piece and crucifixes on the walls. The display is set up in a series of small rooms to try and replicate the look of these actual rooms and has a mixture of painting, altars, statues and furniture to try and get the effect. There are good booklets in English about the collection.

The modern art section was weird to stay the least. The current exhibition is by a group of American painters from the 60s and 70s and almost defies description. If you take Ren and Stimpy and mix it with Badly Drawn and then add someone on an acid trip having a seizure with a highlighter pen, then you are getting close-ish. I can definitely see why it has a parental guidance warning.

The final floor is only small and at the moment has an exhibition of photos from the local area in the 60s and 70s. It’s a mixture of important festivals, weddings and everyday life and there are some really lovely photos in amongst them.

By the time I got out of the museum, the sun was shining again so I headed up the side of the river towards the old town again. There are some great views of the old town from down near the museum. I ended up sitting in the Vrijthof eating chips out of a cone while watching the sun set behind the church and it was very pleasant. It got cold quite quickly once the sun went down so I headed back to the hostel.

The next morning, I was up early to head back to the station to go back to Aachen and on to Munster. I asked at the station about train tickets and the woman said it was much cheaper to catch the bus. Bus 50 goes from outside the front of the train station and goes pretty much in a straight line through to Aachen. It still takes an hour though because it stops at so many little villages. I had no idea that the border was so close to Aachen. It really is in the outer suburbs. Once I arrived, I pretty much jumped on the train and continued onto Munster. So stay tuned!