I'm wrapping up my final weekend in Maastricht and wanted to take the time to reflect on the past few days. Really, this weekend has been exactly what I was looking forward to most when I came over here, a chance to get to live normally in Europe. Today was mostly devoted to editing papers that are due this week, and Friday I did a bit of reading and enjoyed a long bike ride along the Albert Canal in the afternoon. But it was yesterday that take the cake.
About noon, Amy, Erin, and I headed down to the river for some lunch. The destination? A little place we see every weekend on our bus ride to the train station. The Burrito Bar.
Really it fulfills within us the only complaint I've heard out of anyone's mouth since we've been over here, "I miss Tex Mex" (please don't forget the fact that I'm traveling with a bunch of Texans!) So, we headed down to the burrito bar to enjoy chips and guacamole, chicken quesadillas, and steak burritos. My, and was it tasty. I'd heard that it was alright, not the best food of the kind, but can you expect much more than this when you're eating burritos in Holland? I thought it was delicious, and I was amused by the fact that the menu said that the restaurant did workshops to teach you how to make guacamole, salsa, burritos, and quesadillas. I'm sort of sad that I didn't get to learn the Dutch tradition of guacamole making.
After a five hour break in which I finally finished my last book of the semester (yay! lets see how many fun books I can read before school starts!) the three of us hopped on our bikes, this time to cross the river to the movie theater. This was something that I had really wanted to do, go see a movie. I was interested to see if there were any cultural differences, and lucky me. Remember what I told you about Dutch television? If it isn't a children's show, it isn't dubbed. The same goes for movies over here. This unfortunately ended our desire to go see Toy Story 3. We had to come up with something else.
The first difference you'll notice at the movie theater is the food (of course!)
1. alcoholic beverages are not only allowed but sold in the theater, including but not limited to beer, wine, and other fruity mixed drinks.
2. There are plenty other options to drink
3. They do have popcorn, but it is unsalted and unbuttered and therefore has no point in its existence. Anyways, this isn't the movie snacking food anyway.
4. There's an entire fill your own bag candy section.
So what does one eat when they go to the movies? Back at the beginning of June, when we were on our group trip me and several other girls sat down at lunch with out sandwiches and potato chips when Maaike, our program coordinator, commented on how odd it is that we eat chips with sandwiches. "When do you guys eat chips?" we asked her, and she just shrugged, "when your sitting on the couch late at night watching tv." We all exchanged a look between each other, "well, that's what we do with popcorn." So there you have the answer. When you go to the movies in Europe you eat Potato chips! Really whatever kind out want. I had a brand called Nibb-its which reminded me of the fried french fries you can buy. They had a little spice seasoning to it, I think it was paprika.
Oh, and another interesting thing about the movie, about an hour and a half into the show the lights went up and the screen went black. Now, I'd been to the movies in Clinton enough to immediately think "malfunction", but when no one else seemed concerned I suddenly realized it was an intermission. Our movie wasn't exceptionally long, 2 and a half hours tops and still they paused for a snack refill/ bathroom break. It was kind of nice.
Our movie let out about 23:00 and we started to ride back into town with a short detour to the city center. For the past two weekends
Andre Reiu has been giving a concert in the Vrijthof (the name of the area next to the most prominent cathedral in town. It means graveyard because, obviously that's where the cemetery was. Today, however it's a below ground parking garage and the surface level is a large square filled with little cafes.) Reiu is apparently a well known violinist. I had never heard of him before coming here, but Amy said that he always appears on TV around Christmas time. He was born in Maastricht and comes back (annually I think) to give concert. The Vrijthof was blocked off so we couldn't see in, but we found a little cafe around the corner that had a television sitting outside so you could see what was happening on stage and still hear the music from the square. We parked our bikes against the building and listen for a good hour. It was amusing actually because nearly every song had words that everyone knew and people were singing along at the top of their lungs. Oh, and they were dancing. My personal favorite was when the orchestra and a visiting singer broke into a version of "Sweet Caroline," and you could hear everyone in the square yelling "So good! so good, so good, so good!"
By the time we were done roaming the streets it was one o'clock. How's that for a night on the town?
This morning we hit the road early in an attempt to beat the lines at the Vatican Museum, which we were fairly successful at doing. Here are some of the highlights of our visit with our added commentary: free of charge. 
