OK, I promise London highlights are coming soon, but there are a lot of pictures to deal with for that post and I don't want to get too far behind on what we're currently up to. So here's the latest.

We are changing countries at a rapid rate these days and it's getting a little dizzying! In just the past few days, we've been in England, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and Germany again. But it's fun to be back on the Continent for something new.

London to Cologne by Train

Thursday we spent our last morning in London at the British Museum, had one more lunch at Wagamama, then took a cab to the train station around 1:00. We weren't looking forward to the train journey to Cologne, since we've gotten so spoiled by having a car, but it went quite smoothly.

The first half of the trip was on the Eurostar, a high-speed train that goes from London to Lille through a tunnel under the English Channel, then on to Paris or Brussels. I hadn't realized that the Eurostar had moved to a brand new train station in London (St. Pancras International, completed in 2007) - it was beautiful! I've only ridden the Eurostar once, back in 2000, when it left from the Waterloo station. St. Pancras is all shiny and new, with lots of nice shops like a good airport.

The check-in and security process was also similar to an airport, but at least we got to keep our shoes on! However, David kept setting off the metal detector despite having removed everything from his pockets, so he was treated to a vigorous rubdown from a security agent. The agent never could find the source of the metal, and eventually gave up. We're guessing the metal grommets on his cargo pants might be the culprit.

The train was really nice, the ride was smooth, and David loved the high speeds (up to 160mph, I think). I got a good deal on the Standard Premier class, so we had two facing seats and a table to ourselves, which was nice and roomy. Also like an airplane, a nicely-presented light meal was delivered to our seats and it was crap. The roll was good, though.


The meal

The trip from London to Brussels took just under two hours. In the Brussels-Midi train station we bought our tickets and waited for about 30 minutes on the platform for our German ICE (Inter-City Express) train. Thankfully it was direct to Cologne so we didn't have to change again.


ICE train, Brussels-Cologne

This train was very full but new and nice, and we had a really comfortable two-hour ride. It got dark soon after we left and it felt cozy in our well-lit car, rocketing through the night. An electronic reader-board informed us that it got up to 130mph at one point.

Cologne

Our one-night stay in Cologne was short but sweet. We lived in nearby Bonn for four months in the winter of 2007-08, so Cologne is familiar, and we both love Germany to pieces. We stayed in a little hotel called the Domstern, which was close to the train station but remarkably hard to find nevertheless - we wandered around in the dark for awhile with our luggage, but were still in good spirits. Our room was small but clean and comfortable, and we slept very well.



Sorry for the mess - I forgot to take photos until the morning.

It was fun to practice our very basic German a bit at dinner that night (at a small, friendly joint called Zum Köbes), where no one spoke English for a change. We were able to read almost the whole German menu and were quite proud - but food is always our strong suit in foreign languages. :) I had a wiener schnitzel and David had thick noodles with mushroom cream sauce; both were very good.

After a light breakfast in the hotel Friday morning, I uploaded pictures of Oxford and London and took some new photos of Cologne Cathedral while David took the train to Dusseldorf to pick up our new rental car. It's NICE. It's another BMW, but instead of the super-speedy M3 we had in Britain, it's a bigger, fancier, smoother 5-series. It's wonderful. I could live in it. It even has wood paneling! David drove it back to the Cologne hotel in the blink of an eye, clocking 120 mph on the autobahn at one point (I'm glad I wasn't there for that).


The new car parked in Cologne

We met outside the cathedral at noon, which was kind of romantic, then picked up delicious hot pretzels from the train station, hopped in our shiny new chariot, and headed west to the Netherlands.


Alongside a tram on our way out of Cologne


Inside the new ride

Maastricht

Our destination on Friday afternoon was Maastricht, in the far southwest corner of the Netherlands. It is a historic city and seemed to make a good stop on the way to France. Best yet, we stayed overnight in a Gothic church! We stayed in the Kruisherenhotel, an ultra-modern hotel built inside a 15th-century church and monastery. Our small, pretty hotel room is in the monastery and overlooks the cloister. The reception, restaurant, and lounge are in the church, which is amazing! You can read a book on a plush modern sofa in a former side chapel, right across from a medieval altar. Magnificent! I wonder if I can find a medieval stone altar for our house...


Exterior


Entrance


Entrance from inside


The restaurant


Cozy nook in one of the side chapels


Original wall painting in a side chapel


Our room, with art based on a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci. The twin-beds-pushed-together arrangement is very common in the Netherlands - we do enjoy having our own duvets!


Work area, where I wrote the post on Oxford


Bathroom, with gnome. There's a super-deep bathtub and shower behind the door on the left - I've never seen one so deep. It was pretty great.


View from our window!

We had dinner in the hotel restaurant, because it was raining outside and how often do you get a chance to dine under a medieval vault? But it wasn't that great of an experience, sadly. It turned out to be a very fancy restaurant with seriously high prices, and although the food was really good (David had fish on risotto and I had quail with saffron pilaf), the staff seemed nervous and uptight while trying very hard to be fancy, the service was really slow, and we weren't totally sure if we were acceptable in our travel clothes. So we were glad to be done.

However, we did sit near a group of well-dressed British ladies, one of whom took a call from her husband that we really enjoyed overhearing: "Hello, Dahling, are you on your way to the country?" "I've just had my first sip of wine in Maas... Mastr... where are we again?" Later, she laughed so hard she snorted. She was great.




Maastricht as a whole was nice, but David and I independently came to the same conclusion: it feels a little too much like Belgium, which it closely borders. It was surprisingly different from the Dutch cities of the north we're more familiar with, like Amsterdam, Leiden and Delft - less orderly, less bicycles, less friendly, and less English spoken (everywhere else, they speak it enthusiastically and like natives).

As far as my work goes, however, Maastricht has one major thing going for it: the oldest church in the Netherlands. I visited it Saturday morning while David walked around exploring the rest of the city. It's called St. Servaas and apparently some of it dates from as early as 1000 AD. It's a really impressive Romanesque basilica in the German style, with twin towers and round apses at both ends. It also has a really good treasury, with room after room displaying some seriously great medieval stuff. That was a nice surprise.


Exterior


View from cloister


Interior


Tomb of St. Servaas in the crypt

The other highlight of Maastricht for me was the Selexyz Dominicanen, a Dominican church transformed into a bookstore! They sure know how to put their disused churches to good use in Maastricht. It was my two great cultural loves brought together in one place - quite a memorable experience! And I think they did a great job of preserving and using the old church.





France, Schmance

This afternoon we had planned to head from Maastricht to Reims, France, which is home to one of the best Gothic cathedrals in France. However, the French are currently getting totally out of control with nationwide strikes, because of a government proposal to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 (imagine!). Public transport has been interrupted for days, but since we have a car we thought we were fine.

But now the oil refinery workers have joined the strike so there are major fuel shortages. About 10% of gas stations are now empty, fuel supplies to the main Paris airport may even run out soon, and people have started panic buying. And every few days, about a million workers take to the streets to protest. There was one today and another scheduled for Tuesday. Oy vey. (Here's the latest from the BBC.)

Since there are nice things to take pictures of throughout Europe, and we are, after all, the bosses of our little company, we quickly decided France is not worth the hassle of tangling with protests or waiting for hours at a gas station. So we turned around and headed back to Germany! As you may have gathered by now, it's where we'd rather be anyway, so it wasn't a hard decision to make.

We haven't totally given up on France yet, however; we'll stay in western Germany until mid-week, when there is going to be a vote on the pension reform bill in the Senate, and see if things improve. If they do, we'll probably start a revised French itinerary then. Otherwise, we'll spend our remaining time in Germany, Switzerland and Austria instead.

Mainz

So from Maastricht we drove to Mainz, a sizable historic city along the Rhine River. The drive took about 2.5 hours, and other than intermittent rainstorms and a major traffic jam near Aachen due to road work, it was a really pleasant drive. We'll be here two nights.



Tonight we are staying in a lovely room at the Hyatt Regency with a view of the river (above), thanks to the super-cheap rates that business hotels offer on Saturday nights. We wouldn't be able to afford the regular rate for the room tomorrow night, so we'll move across across town to another hotel.


Exterior of the Hyatt


Lobby and restaurant

We enjoyed a more relaxed pace than usual this evening, taking a slow walk through town in the light rain without worrying about photo duties. Mainz is a really pleasant city - it has an attractive little historic center and minimal ugliness on the outskirts despite its size. It centers on a huge, pink-stone Romanesque cathedral, which last time we visited (here's that blog post) was surrounded by a huge Christmas market. Although it's hard to beat a German Christmas market, it is nice to be able to move more freely around the old town without all the booths and crowds of people.


Mainz Cathedral


Buildings on the cathedral square


Some nice buildings in the Old Town

We had a really wonderful dinner tonight at a place called the Augustinerkeller (Augustinian Cellar) that caught our eye during our walk earlier. It turned out to be just as good as its specials board made it look.



Although the streets were quiet, the restaurant was very full when we arrived, which was a good sign. Fortunately, there was an available table downstairs and we had perhaps the hardest-working waitress we've ever seen in Europe, who also spoke perfect English. More importantly, the food was outstanding. We intend to return tomorrow! It was very dimly lit so the photos aren't very pretty, but I did my best:


View from the table


I had roast pork with red cabbage and potato dumplings. The meat was really tender.


David had this jaegerschnitzel, and while my meal was good, his was absolutely heavenly. The picture really doesn't do it justice. I had actually decided tonight that I was done with schnitzel, since it isn't usually all that special, but this one got me all confused again! The mushroom-cream sauce was the best ever, the pork was much more tender than usual, and the breading was just right. Even the fries were perfect.


Apfelschnitzel to share. Also better than usual, with a fresh and flaky crust and really good vanilla bean ice cream. Mmmmm.

Tomorrow should be another fairly relaxing day, with only a couple of churches to photograph and the move to the other hotel. We're moving to another business hotel with a desk, so that should be ideal conditions for me to finally get caught up on the London blog post, I hope! Guten nacht!

Labels: cologne, germany, maastricht, mainz, netherlands, train