Smore Traveling with Brian

Since it's been slow here in Amsterdam, here's one last post about Brian's visit. The last trip we took with Brian was to Maastricht.


Wedged between Belgium and Germany in the very southern part of the Netherlands, Maastricht is known for its relaxed atmosphere and the foreign influence- the city likes to joke that it's not really Dutch. This was most obviously reflected in the food, which was fantastic. In fact, dining is almost all we remember about Maastricht. Well that and our comically long and ridiculous attempt to find the "amazing, must-see" Roman fort south of the city that took us about two hours to find and five minutes to see. Because we went there, here's a picture:


In addition to the fort, the area around Maastricht is riddled with caves. The caves have a long history of hiding soldiers, as far back as the Romans and as recent as WWII, so they have some very interesting graffiti. We went into one cave, but all it said was "2-Pac 4 ever" and "Johan Hearts Marta." We don't think that's Roman... It was a little early in the year (and a Sunday) so we didn't take a tour, but we will when we go back.

The other thing Maastricht is famous for is being the original birthplace of the marshmallow. Here, a statue of the inventor, Jan Pieter Minckeleers, holds a marshmallow on a stick. He liked them well done:


Finally, we drove due east for an hour and took a short walking tour of Cologne, Germany. Cologne is home to Germany's most famous Giant European Church, the Koelner Dom:


For some reason, even though we'd walked all over Maastricht looking for that stupid Roman fort, we thought it would be a good idea to walk up into the church spires. That's about 500 feet up. Not a good idea. But, after walking 500 feet back down, we managed to find a nice German restaurant with some nice German beer and magically, all was well in the world. Funny how that works.

We'll put some more pics up in the Flickr account soon. And, if anybody's heard from Brian, let us know. Though he must have checked his email six, seven times a day while he was here, we never heard from him again...