Liège

That was my morning trip: Liège, Belgium. Aachen in Germany is also close to Maastricht, but I’ve been to Aachen before.

In recent history Liège is perhaps best known for its massive fortifications at the time of WWI: so massive that the German Army had to devote a special task force to reducing it. They finally succeeded in that effort, but it can be plausibly claimed that the resources used against Liège contributed to the failure of the Von Schlieffen Plan; certainly the French government saw it that way, and rewarded the city after the war with the Légion d’Honneur.

The entire region is somewhat reminiscent of Pennsylvania, sharing both the beautiful hilly countryside and the crippled industrial infrastructure. At one point within the past decade Liège had the highest crime rate in all of the European Union. I don’t know if that’s still true, but one certainly feels perfectly safe there on a sunny Monday morning.

My first impressions of the city were deceptively poor. The new train terminal looks impressive enough, but it’s fairly far from the city center. Worse yet, it’s aligned in such a way that the maps do not easily guide you toward the center. It’s certainly walkable in terms of distance, though not so walkable in terms of user friendliness of the street plan near the station. I had to ask directions several times even in order for the map to become usable.

But once all those hurdles were cleared, it was a pleasant morning in Liège. Many beautiful old buildings lie just to the east of center, and the general atmosphere of the place is more interesting than I was led to expect.

I ended up in a bookstore, of course (the natural vice of philosophers, as tobacco chewing is the natural vice of baseball players). Somehow the U.S. History section caught my eye. I keep hoping to run across the French version of Shelby Foote’s Civil War, which I’ve heard was well received in France. They didn’t have that, but did have Bruce Catton’s rival volume, and it is handsomely produced.

Back in Maastricht, had a nice quick lunch with Tzuchien Tho (saw him in Paris just two months ago), then had to go out to buy some replacement luggage for the piece that has begun falling apart on this trip without warning. While rolling the luggage through the mud of Ghent a few days ago, there was apparently a hole in the suitcase that allowed my best clothes to become covered with mud. The cleaners in Maastricht all say 2-3 days, so I’m going casual for the Maastricht lecture. They don’t seem the type to mind anyway.