Liège

I spent a little time this morning getting through one more day's worth of photos. I visited Liège last Monday, my first full day on the Continent.

I actually visited twice owing to an unfortunate misunderstanding between me and a ticket kiosk at Brussles Gare-Midi, in which I bought a ticket for the SNCB slow train to Aachen, Germany, but, because it was the next one leaving, I got on the Deutsche Bahn ICE to Aachen.¹ This resulted in me paying the 60 € ($70) ICE fare to Liège (on top of the 23 € fare to Aachen I'd already paid), where they politely asked me to get off the train and stay within my own ticket class in the future. Why they simply didn't charge me the fare to Aachen and let me stay on the train was not a question they were prepared to answer in English or French, and my German isn't good enough for that conversation.

In any event, that gave me a full hour to take photos of the Liège-Guillemins train station while I waited for the next departure for Aachen Aix-en-Chapelle. I now know why people call it the most beautiful railway station in the world:

I mentioned last week that I climbed the Montagne de Bueren steps but didn't make it clear that this was on my return trip to Liège from Aix-en-Chapelle Aachen. And I already posted the view from the bottom of the stairs; here's the view from the top:

Liège is also famous for its meatballs (boulets à la Liégeoise). Naturally, I tried some, and they were delicious:

(Note the green beans: I justifiably worried that the Belgian diet of frites and meats would require green vegetables as often as I could find them. I was not wrong.)

OK, I'm down to 588 photos that still require geolocation and descriptions in Adobe Lightroom, but at least I didn't liège the best for last. More later.