Saturday around town

‘nice to be back off the road…it was a short trip but with a lot of stops.  The 16 hour trip back on the plane didn’t help, and there was an absolutely stationary queue of traffic waiting for me on the ring road around Eindhoven and south towards Maastricht.  I wish I had a way to gauge the length of these jams, but after spending an hour to make ten km progress, I angled off to Venlo to get around it.

It’s nice to let go of a long trip with some simpler, grounded activity closer to home.  Maastricht is a wonderful city for walking, with lots of twisted old streets and big public squares.  I’m still discovering nooks and notches in my new town: today’s find was a traditional bakery still grinding it’s flour by water wheel.  There was also time for exploring St. Servaas church, dating back more than a thousand years.

Traditional green, yellow, and red decorations have started to appear in anticipation of Carnival, still a month away at February 22-24.    Shops are selling masks and costumes, and floats are starting to take shape in scattered workshops.  This isn’t a celebration that I remember from Arnhem, but clearly one that will be a big event here in the South.