Muck, Muck, Meuse

My third class this period is an excursion course, consisting of two three-day trips around the Netherlands and a 20-minute presentation next month. The excursions were last week and the week before: the first to the province of Limburg, which consists mainly of a little piece of the Netherlands hanging down between Belgium and Germany; and the second to the north and eastern provinces.

The first trip was by far the less pleasant: a combination of a mean wind and a near-constant drizzle saw to that. The first day was spent stopping at sites where archaeological consulting groups are conducting digs in advance of building projects getting started, and most of what they found was neolithic traces. That means, essentially, that they dug lots of big holes and found some spots of darker earth in amongst the normal dirt, indicating old wells, or post-holes, or hearths. Few to no artifacts survive thousands of years in the wet-but-not-boggy Limburg area, so there were no clay pots to put back together, no pieces of wood to do analysis on... just dirt.

It's a secret known to most geologists that certain kinds of dirt, when met by weeks of light-to-medium rainfall, create a substance called "mud," and that such a substance is a horrible surface to walk on. This "mud" was everywhere in the Meuse River watershed area, which was also the area that contained the bulk of our sites*. The freshmen who naively wore their everyday shoes were the worst off; at some points I regretted having left my wellies in Boston, but most of the time my trusty hiking boots did their job, which is keeping the outside world away from my feet.

*the other sites were the Roman ruins (see below), and a flint mine that would have been extremely cool if it wasn't a half-hour hike up what would normally be a dirt road but what a sudden torrential downpour was quickly making into a medium-sized streambed. I'm sure the flint mine itself was interesting, but I was forced to stop paying attention about five minutes in when I saw this:
Please keep in mind the fact that that egg sac was about the size of a ping pong ball, and that this guy was only one of literally thousands of the mine's inhabitants. 40% of the others were gnats; 30% mosquitos.

My boots, incidentally, have now undergone trial by fire (Hawaii volcano camp), ice (glacier hiking near Calgary), water, and mud, so they've led a pretty full life at this point. The mud we had to wade through to reach the interesting parts of the dirt had the consistency of frosting and added a couple of pounds to each boot, and probably bumped me up to an even 6' in height, by the end of one stop.

Despite the muddiness, I really like the southern corner of the Netherlands is nice because it reminds me of the region in Germany where I lived. There are what the Dutch call "mountains," which are hills, and lots of chestnut trees, and little towns with cobblestones and streets that wind up and around. Our hotel was called "Bergrust," which means "mountain rest," an idea that is apparently extremly funny if you're Dutch, as about half of the kids in my program are.

By the third day, we finally had some dry things to look at: Roman ruins in the town of Tongeren, Belgium. There were lots of walls and some temple foundations, but the interesting thing for me was a cross section of a Roman road, which is completely not what I have always imagined them to look like. The Roman army, a group of men who wore sandals and marched dozens of miles a day, built themselves roads of... gravel.


The other highlight of the trip was a group of friendly ponies living in a field near an excavation. They seemed very interested in the plants growing just outside of their fence, even though they were definitely the same as the plants they could easily access. The babies had very soft noses.

Slightly less friendly was this sheep I found in the gift shop at the Hunebedden museum, during our second trip:
We were very excited about the Hunebedden, both because the existence of a museum automatically cut down on the number of hours we would spend outside in the drizzle that day and because the Hunebedden are basically the Dutch Stonehenge: huge dolmens (neolithic tombs) made of boulders left behind with the glaciers retreated to Scandanavia after the last ice age. At one point, they were like creepy, dark houses, all covered in sod and totally cut off from the outside world, but now all that's left are the huge rocks making up the framework:

The second trip was better all around, since the weather got better after the first day, and the sites had more artifacts and much less mud. We drove across the Aufsluitdijk, the dike that keeps the ocean out of the manmade inland sea (and therefore keeps the water out of the Dutch people's backyards), and all the way across the northern part of the country, nearly to the German border. This proximity to Germany allowed us to catch some German radio stations in the van, which meant a rollicking afternoon of pretending to sing along to a lot of accordion music. There is also Dutch accordion music, which is very similar to the German kind, but instead of singing about drinking, the Dutch sing songs with lyrics like: "my dentures are loose, / my dentures are loose / my dentures are loose / they have fallen on the grass."

This was actually the real chorus of a song.

We also saw probably the greatest statue in Europe, which I unfortunately wasn't quick enough to get a picture of. It consisted of a bronze set of legs, either briskly walking or slowly running, cut off at the waist. To put it another way, it was a statue of a butt.

In place of photographic evidence of the butt-statue, I'll give you this sign from someone's yard in Essen:
It's even funnier if you don't know that in Europe, a red circle means "don't do this."

Once it became sunny, the field trip was like a romp in a fairy tale, since the northeast of the Netherlands is full of German-style forests and magical plants that I have never actually seen in real life, like these adorable mushrooms.
They're sitting on a pile of slag, which is the molten ferrous silica waste that runs off from smelting furnaces. This particular slag is several thousand years old, but that didn't stop our professor from encouraging us to take some home. "There's plenty for everyone!" he might have said (but didn't). Or, more accurately, "no one but geo-dorks would even know what these drippy-looking rocks are, let alone want to take one."

Then, for some reason, we went to a castle, which had no geological or archaeological relevance, but had some terrifyingly big grey koi fish in the moat.

Sometimes it's hard to tell by appearances why a place might be interesting, though. This next picture, you will probably say, is of my class standing around a woodland pool, learning about the geological significance of it. No, it's an archaeologically important pool, since it was dug by humans to fill a brook (also dug by humans) that would then power a water wheel, that would in turn run several paper mills. We visited one of the mills, but couldn't get too close because it's now someone's house. If they had been home, we would have been able to tell them that they should really do something about the huge hornet nest in the tree right next to the door, but I'm guessing they already have some idea about that. Hornets are much, much bigger than whatever I used to think were hornets, and what I now assume to be just normal wasps. Despite my deliciousness to bugs of all kinds, I somehow avoided getting stung, so that was a high point.

Our last stop may have been the most pleasant: a landscape of shifting sand dunes in the Veleuwe, where wild heather has all but taken over. The heather pretty much obscures any geological features of interest, but it's really a cute little plant, so when I got back to Amsterdam I bought a little pot of it for my room.