Churches Everywhere! (More About Maastricht)

Ceiling of the Dominican bookstore.

Ceiling of the Dominican bookstore.

I realized yesterday that I promised more posts about my trip to Maastricht a couple of weeks ago, and totally forgot. I already wrote about the American cemetery that I visited, and here’s the short version of the rest of the stuff I saw in Maastricht!

First of all, it is an OLD city. Really old. People keep asking me what I like about the Netherlands, and I keep saying old buildings, which earns me odd looks as if to say: “You’re in the city with the largest bar in Europe, and you’re talking about the buildings?” (At one orientation event, the speaker commented that Groningen has so many bars that you could go to a different one every night of a typical study-abroad stay. He then clarified that this was not a challenge.) But back to the point: Maybe it’s going to a school with a Historic Preservation department for undergrad, but yes, I really like old buildings. We don’t really have them in the States. So in Maastricht, where parts of the medieval city walls still stand alongside literally a half-dozen medieval churches and a bunch of other slightly-newer-but-still-older-than-my-entire-country buildings, I was pretty impressed. I kept stopping to take pictures of apparently unremarkable buildings because they were SO OLD.

Obviously, I was there for a class assignment about Christian Cultural Heritage, so the churches were the highlight. We visited three.

The Dominican Church in Maastricht was turned into a bookstore in 2006. It has since made a bunch of “most beautiful bookstore in the world” lists, and not without reason. It took us ages to find it, but when we found it I was completely blown away. The best part was that three stories of bookshelves have been built into the nave, so when you’re at the top level, you can get a close-up look at the top of the stained glass and the paintings on the ceiling.

The monastery-turned-hotel

The Kruisheren Hotel is in a 15th century  monastery. I’d heard it was beautiful, and when we stopped to ask for directions to the bookstore we were told that the hotel bar was a good place to stop for a drink, so we hunted it down as well. The design is really modern, which actually looks quite cool against the grand gothic surroundings of the monastery cathedral. (And the bar is where the altar would have been, which was probably mostly a practical choice but I found it quite funny.) I couldn’t get good pictures, but there’s great ones at the link above! There was a wedding reception going on while we were there, so we also got to admire the bride’s amazing dress. Old buildings and pretty dresses, my day was pretty much made.

The Onze Lieve Vrouw basilica is the only church we visited that was actually a church, and the one I was actually doing my assignment on. It has a statue of Mary, the “Star of the Sea,” to which several miracles have been attributed, so it’s a bit of a pilgrimage site. Once Mass got going I was busy taking notes and trying to understand the Dutch, but before it started we had time to walk around the building, and it is actually literally the most beautiful church I’ve ever been in. (And, as you may have noticed, I visit a lot of churches.) I can’t even really remember what it was about it that was so striking – something about the colors of the paintings in the basilica dome and the elaborately carved confessionals and the candles flickering off the silver medals in the chapel to Mary, one medal for each miracle she’s supposed to have performed. But seriously, beautiful. I don’t actually understand how Catholic services are supposed to involved so much time with your head bowed, because I couldn’t stop staring at the ceiling.

So that was my trip to Maastricht!

The Onze Lieve Vrouw basilica.

The Onze Lieve Vrouw basilica.

And now, I want to address a myth, which occurred to me while I was in Maastricht and has occurred to me again writing this. When I was getting ready to come here, people asked how my Dutch was and I said not so good, and they said, “Well, you’ll learn fast once you get there, being immersed in it.” I kind of imagined that once I was listening to Dutch often, my brain would just sort of get frustrated not understanding and spontaneously start making sense of it independent of me doing much.

This, apparently, is NOT how learning by immersion works. Listening to the homily in Dutch at Onze Lieve Vrouw, I understood maybe one word in four, if I focused really hard. If I didn’t focus, it all sort of blurred together into a string of scary foreign sounds. And whether I focused or not, I didn’t understand enough to fill in a guess about what in the world the priest was trying to say. Reading is better, because I can go at my own pace. At the market or the grocery store, if someone asks me a question I’m not prepared for, it doesn’t matter if I know all the words they’ve said – native speakers just talk too fast for me, and Dutch word order is quite different from English, so I have to mentally take apart each word and put them back together before I can answer, which takes way too long if there’s someone in the queue behind me waiting to buy their groceries.

I’m still really enjoying learning Dutch – I get so excited whenever I successfully have a conversation, or recognize a new word in a book. But the whole “oh, you’ll learn by immersion” thing was definitely a myth. Language learners, you’ve been warned.

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