Wandering Through Becca's World

We traveled very few miles today, possibly only a couple, and mostly on foot.  Our goals were small: we wanted to see where Becca goes to school, her daily patterns, and we wanted to eat something yummy.

First we slept as long as we wanted. Maybe we even got caught up. That was excellent.  Then we met Rebecca outside her house, at the bus stop, at 10:30.  Her house is about 500 steps from where we are staying (I know this because I am my mother's daughter and I counted).  We took the bus to the other, artier, side of the river,

and we went to a nice cafe that Alissa and Becca had tried out a little while ago.  Becca assured us that the Dutch do brunch well, unlike dinner.  She was right -- and the portion sizes were larger than we expected.  Jon ordered chocolate milk and it turned out to be a tall glass of hot milk with chocolate shavings in the bottom.  The chocolate was delicious.  We got a brunch plate of stuff to share:  good bread, Guernsey butter, chutney and jams, a bowl of yogurt and fruit, slices of cheese and prosciutto (or something), scrambled eggs.  We ordered too much other food too and Becca had to take home her egg wrap. That meal got us all the way through the day.

We walked across the bridge (very scenic, up and down the river, not cluttered, the buildings are low and solid and architecturally coherent) to the fancier part of downtown where there are more shops and more cobblestone streets.

Wandered over to the School of Business and Economics, which R. says is the largest of all the various schools at the University.  Walked through the quiet halls, looked into small classrooms (class sizes are about ten), admired the technology that exists nowadays for giving presentations.  The teaching method in her program is that the students teach every class -- they are assigned well in advance, they do all the preparation, they lead the discussion.  The teacher chimes in when needed.  They are trying to give lots of practice in public speaking.  It sounds scary to me but also effective.  We looked at the cafeteria area where R. does most of her writing and preparing (she has discovered that working at home is not her best bet), along with lots of other people.

Since she lives here, she has never really been a tourist. She didn't know where we would go to learn about Maastricht.  Google directed us to one museum right near the Christmas market that is getting disassembled, but when we went in we learned that the museum has changed its mission since they didn't get enough customers who wanted to know about local history.  The current exhibit is by a local photographer who happened to be in New York during 9/11.  Umm, no thanks. So we went to the natural history museum as a second best option.

There was a display of super enlarged photographs of bugs.  Amazing colorful weird bugs.  Not exactly anything to do with the area.




Then the permanent collection was fossils and rocks and coal, but all the signage was in Dutch.  Luckily there was a movie and luckily it had English subtitles.  We learned that there was a dinosaur called Mosasaurus that was discovered right here in Maastricht because there used to be a body of water here (in the Cretaceous era) and now there is a lot of limestone that they use in their buildings -- that's how the bones were found.  R. says that particular dinosaur had a large role in Jurassic World and now she knows that her city is famous for that. There you go.

(Jon is now reading about the museum, in hindsight, and he finds that we missed a room that had a special curiosity in it: a rat king.  A rat king is a bunch of rats whose tails are all tangled together with hair and other stuff and this phenomenon happens in Germany the most. This is the most disgusting thing I can imagine and I am glad we missed it.)

Picture from Wikipedia.

My knee is a limiting factor, especially when walking on pavement and cobblestones. It makes R. feel sorry for me (I am used to my unwieldy gate) and she lets us sit down to rest whenever.  We walked home to her apartment and I took a nap while the two of them did crossword puzzles or something.  Then they finally went out shopping for dinner.  Jon made something with rice and sugar snap peas and a local ham/bacon that is available in so many different size packages that he had to buy it and see what it was.  Dinner at R's table was lovely. Her apartment is fully, fully furnished with everything IKEA and I like those dishes and pots. Nice quality.

The two of them could do crossword puzzles all night, but I reminded them that they had a plan to make reservations for another leg of the trip. Oh yes, woops. I walked home to take a bath in the gigantic bath tub that is almost as good as a hot tub while they planned Copenhagen and more.

There is nothing better than a no-travel day when you are on a big trip. And it took some digging, but we learned something new about Maastricht that R. didn't know before.