A Weekend in Maastricht: Flea Markets and Fresh Linen

Restful weekends don't have to be boring, nor do they have to be inactive. All they require is no strict agenda and the flexibility to wander. My Maastricht weekend was essentially a cafe/bar crawl that fed me the food I wanted to eat, the chat I wanted to chat and the atmosphere I wanted to soak up. There was no itinerary but to enjoy the city and each other's company.

 

Maastricht is perfect for such a weekend because the buzz of the city is centered around it's university rather than it's attractions. Like the locals we browsed the flea market for treasures and met a photography man with enough enthusiasm to build Rome in a day (just with camera lenses) who chatted to us and let us take photos with his goods. Kerry had cake fro breakfast and we had a large paper cones of chips that we ate on the steps overlooking the river.

We stumbled across a large orchestra with a huge screen showing the underwater world that we later found out had something to do with a bike race, but it was weird and bizarre and the audience were sparse so we ran away giggling trying to find the famous bookshop converted church, because we felt like sitting about dutch books and drinking iced tea. So we did just that.

After an hour of bearing our souls we walked back slowly through the shops, buying cheap makeup and pop socks and marvelling at the lovely clothes. We arrived at our beautiful Town House hotel and collapsed on the soft, fresh linen and checked our iphones for social network updates and didn't feel guilty about it one bit.