After pretty much no sleep on the plane on my part and with Erik having gotten just enough to be loopy, we arrived at Amsterdam at 1:00 PM local time. All the students and luggage made it, so we passed right out of the airport and into a waiting bus for our three hour drive to Maastricht. When we arrived at the dorm, it was raining. Séverine Dufour, the trip coordinator from U. Maastricht, came onto the bus to greet us all and then helped us get situated with the Guesthouse people. After dumping our belongings in our room, we went down to dinner in the cafeteria. Just to make sure we hit the ground running, a group of representatives from the Erasmus Student Network met our group at 6:30 in the lobby and took us over to the Brusselsepoort (shopping mall) to show us around.
Everything but the grocery stores was closed, so we picked up some fruit and yoghurt and some shaving soap for Erik’s precious straight razor. The variety and inexpensiveness of the produce here really surprised us. The variety of cheeses and meats, especially different types of sausage, is great, too. Grandpa John will be happy to know that all of the grocery stores here run on the Aldi model in that the shopping bags are reusable and cost money and that the shopping carts are only released by a 1 Euro coin. There is an Aldi in town, but we have not shopped there.
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