Belgium and the Netherlands

This weekend Charlie visited again. We went to the Barbecue on Friday at my place with a lot of the people I live with. There's one almost every week and it's a great place to go and just relax and talk with people while grilling some food. It's held right outside next to the tiny stream at my place. I went with Charlie to see the start of the bike race on Sunday. They weren't yet racing where I saw them ride by -- they have pace cars like in Nascar for certain parts of the race. We had a Belgian beer and some Belgian Waffles and then Charlie biked off for the race and, once I had walked through a couple-mile-long outdoor market, I decided to use my all-day train+bus pass to go to Maastricht, Netherlands.
First, the market. It was interesting. They have lots of chickens, live and dead. People were buying cooked chickens on one side of the aisle and buying one to put in a box on the other side. Old-school 'for here' and 'to-go'. And they literally just put the live chicken into a cardboard box when they sold it. That's different. They had a lot of stuff to sell, actually. Sweets, clothes, fruits, waffles. They even had guys like Billy Mays who sell things in TV commercials. Vacuums, Knife Sets, and the like.
Something I particularly liked was that when I was ordering french fries I said everything correctly in French (most of Belgium speaks French) but I said the word "large" in German and the owner of the stand changed languages immediately and I finished my transaction in German. I was impressed that she was fluent in both and picked up on the mistake I made.
Okay, so now to Maastricht. Maastricht is beautiful and jam-packed with history. Impressively clean and architecturally a great blend of past and present. My favorite part of the city was Stichting Dierenpark because it felt like an accidental zoo. Before reaching it, I saw a moving artistic display of dying or extinct animals. Once there I saw a new animal. It is like a deer mixed with a calf. It is pretty.
To get back to the main train station I wanted to take the bus and, after 10 minutes of waiting, I realized I was at an out of use bus stop. It said something in Dutch that I hadn't read upon arrival about being closed.
Dutch. That's something I should write about. My first impression of the Dutch language, written just after arriving: It's like a German speaker and an English speaker got together and they weren't sure how to spell or say things so they just took their words, mixed them together, and then added and changed letters.
Examples: "Price List" + "Preisliste" = "Prijslijst"; "Drink" + "Trank" = "Dranken"; "French Fries" + "Pommes Frites" = "Franse Frietjes"
It's actually kind of nice that I can read and understand almost everything.
Passed a coffee shop that required membership cards / ID on my walk back.

A German girl on the bus had the Australian song Waltzing Matilda as her ringtone.