Down to the Low Countries
Last night in Paris was an adventure: the hostel, it turns out, was next door to a bar that the students of Belleville frequented. The place was hopping, and the music was good.
On the morning of the first I travelled from Paris to Maastricht, via Brussels and Liège. Maastricht is an absolutely beautiful university town in the southern corner of the Netherlands straddling the river Maas. The journey out was relatively painless, but I learned that, in many circumstances, one must book a seat and pay a reservation fee, even with an Inter/Eurail pass. Luckily, the fee is a small fraction of the price of the ticket, but on the other hand, only a few discounted tickets are available on each train; if there aren’t any available, you have to pay full price, or wait. I managed to get from Paris to Brussels no problem (€25 for the ticket), but I accidentally got on the wrong train from Brussels to Liège: you see, I bought a ticket for an Inter City train, but I accidentally got on an Inter Cty Express. The Deutsche Bahn people were very nice and only charged me the €10 “supplementary” fee; they could have easily charged me a fine in addition to the booking fee. Now I know.
Maastricht is fabulous: I’m hatching a hair-brained scheme to do a master’s degree in Europe, inspired by the beauty of the city. Maastricht has about 120,000 residents, a far cry from Paris and London’s millions of inhabitants. Still, the downtown is extensive and busy. Many of the main shopping streets are pedestrian only. The town hall, on the market square, has a carillon in its tower. Throughout the day, the bells will not only ring, but play: as my hosts (thank you to Mads and Cíara for your hospitality and generosity! Someday I’ll host you at mine) and I walked around the antique market held on the square each weekend, the town hall bells played a concert for us. Mads pointed out that the bell ringer was clearly over-qualified: the playing was truly virtuosic (though I don’t know enough about carillon playing to really make a determination).
I know Mads and Cíara from undergrad in St Andrews. Cíara is in Maastricht doing a Master’s degree in digital media cultures (I forgot the exact title of the program). This week, she’s studying “future imaginaries”: how do we envision the future? One of her readings was about the use of metaphors in information technology: the internet as “highway” or “frontier”, data as a liquid that “leaks”, and so on. Fascinating stuff: Mads and I are both as excited about the program as she is. As we discussed the use of metaphors in language, I could tell that Mads was getting excited: he and I did theology together, and in Christian theology there is a long history of worrying about the appropriateness (or inppropriateness) of metaphors for God. It’s easy to get theologians excited, if you know what to say to them.
In the Netherlands, as in France, COVID vaccination checks are common: restaurants, bars, movie theaters, and museums all want to scan your QR code. Because of Brexit, our UK vaccinations are not accepted (all three of us were vaccinated in the UK). This is not because the vaccination itself is wrong: it is the very same vaccine that we would have gotten here and is a kind that is explcitly permitted. The problem is that we do not have EU QR codes, so the scanner rejects us. In France, I was able to convert my UK QR code into a French one, so that I could flash the French code and enter into venues. Fascinatingly, even though French QR codes, being from the EU, are supposed to be accepted in the Netherlands, mine isn’t. It must be some idiosycrasy of the French to accept the UK code. Mads and Cíara will eventually be able to get Dutch codes, but they are waiting on their citizen numbers, which will enable them to get a DigiID number, which will let them get a Dutch QR code. There was also some reason that they had to travel in person to the one office in the Netherlands that could take care of them, and in the meantime, Cíara’s request for a number was forgotten about until she sent a follow-up email after some weeks had passed. And Mads and Cíara are EU citizens! So, in short, it’s all a massive mess, and the EU are taking every opportunity they can to cause inconvenience for British people. Ironically enough, Mads and I aren’t British (Cíara is from Northern Ireland, so she’s technically not British either), and none of us voted to leave; in fact, the Brexit referendum was held before Mads and I moved to the UK!
