Hi everyone! I finally made it over here to Maastricht--yay! After a long and rather exhausting day of travel it's nice to be settled in. First impressions off the plane in The Netherlands...cool place. So far the Dutch people have been very nice and speak English! Dutch is a crazy language though. It's like English and German got together and added some vowels everywhere. After we arrived in Amsterdam, we took a bus to Maastricht. It is about a 2.5 hour bus ride and while I napped most of the way there were lots of cows, sheep and a least one water mill. I knew being below sea level gave the country similarities to south Louisiana, but it sunk in when there was a blue heron walking among some cattails on the side of the road--ha!