1. I thought Utrecht was the oldest town in the Netherlands, but Maastricht is. It's been inhabited since Roman times. There's some dispute about another city, Nijmegen, being older because it obtained Roman city rights, which Maastricht never did--but as far as uninterrupted human habitation, people have lived in Maastricht since at least 50 BC when the Romans founded the town, and possibly about 500 years earlier than that.
2. Maastricht is the place where the first Mosasaur was discovered. A mosasaur is an enormous aquatic lizard up to 56 feet long (!!) that was one of the fiercest beasts in the sea for millions of years. Mosasaurs have double-hinged jaws that let them gulp down a 20-foot fish whole, sharklike teeth that point inward and literally drag the prey down the gullet, and their fossils have been found all over the world. They're believed to have been extremely ferocious--there have been skulls found with massive tooth wounds from other mosasaurs. Think about how life would be if they were alive today. There would be no fishing industry. No scuba diving. No humans anywhere near the ocean. Mosasaurs would eat all the ships! Mwarrr.
Mosasaurs are epically cool. As can be clearly seen, here:
Anyway, the first mosasaur skull was discovered in Maastricht's famous limestone quarries in the 1700's. It was thought to be the skull of an enormous beast that lived in the River Meuse, which runs through Maastricht. All these medieval towns have rivers running through them, incidentally. Most of those rivers do not have significant mosasaur populations, as far as I know.
3. People speak lots of languages in Maastricht. It's located in a little uvula of the Netherlands dangling down between Germany and Belgium, and people speak French, Dutch, German, and English here as well as Limburgish (Maastricht has its own unique dialect of Limburghish, Maastrichtian).
So we got in kinda late and wandered through beautiful cobbly streets in the evening, periodically coming upon wide squares dominated by cathedrals or ornate town halls. Maastricht's basilica, noted for being entirely flat in front (like a halibut!), dates from around 1,000 AD:
More pics from the picturesque night walk:
Yummy:
Local color.
So in the morning, we visited the basilica, including a tour of the museum inside where lots of religious artifacts and statues were on display.
Is anyone else creeped out by reliquaries, or is it just me?
Mugambi went to great lengths to keep the next activity a surprise. He asked me not to read guidebooks about Maastricht, and kept me in the dark right up until we got on a boat that traveled up the river Meuse. I love boat trips! I thought this was it, until the boat pulled over and started letting people off...for a tour of the limestone quarries where the mosasaur was discovered. So excited!! Turns out there are over 185 kilometers of massive tunnels underneath Maastricht where people have been quarrying limestone since the 1500's. It's an enormous labyrinth that stretches all the way to Belgium underground. People came from hundreds of miles around to get limestone to build cathedrals. The tunnels are enormous--walking through, you get a sense of the vast, soaring space of hundreds of cathedrals, stretching on and on into the darkness.
Since the middle ages, people have been putting artwork into the limestone, usually with charcoal. In World War II, the tunnels were used as an air raid shelter and hiding place for Jews and downed pilots.
So we were planning to go home Saturday night, but on a whim we decided to go across the border to Germany and spend the night in Aachen. Aachen is a fairly small town whose claim to fame is that it was the capital of Charlemagne's empire in the 700's. You can still see the cathedral dome he built, complete with 32 (or so) pillars scrounged from ancient Roman sites that are a thousand years or so older than Charlemagne's original buliding. The dome and the surrounding cathedral (built in the 1200's) were quite picturesque. So was the town hall, built around 1000 AD after Charlemagne's palace had been allowed to collapse into ruin. Could you imagine living in Aachen a hundred years or so after Charlemagne's reign, with the big collapsing corpse of his palace just moldering in the center of town? Weird.
Incidentally, the whole time it was bitterly cold. Like 50 degrees F. Which explains why I'm wearing pretty much every piece of clothing I brought with me (all mismatched) in this pic (did I mention it's July here, too?):
Reputedly Charlemagne's actual throne, dating from the 700's:
There are very ornate golden reliquaries in Charlemagne's cathedral containing (ostensibly) his bones and the loin cloth and swaddling clothes of Christ, as well as the Virgin Mary's cloak. Hundreds of thousands of people have been coming to this place for over a thousand years to make a pilgrimage to see the cloth. Naturally, I was the one with the temerity to ask whether they'd ever been carbon dated to see if they really came from the time of Christ. Answer: nope.
So, that's pretty much it. This week is all catching up on work (maybe a trip to Delft, maybe some salsa dancing) and then I'm off to Bretagne for 10 days!
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