Playing Hooky

Every Sunday morning, we get up and walk the dogs and then head to church. Since we don't speak Dutch, our church options are pretty limited so we end up at the chapel on the base. It's not so bad, I guess. But it's not so great either. The priest is a wonderful, genuinely caring person, but he has a tendency to start out, "My dear friends..." and then talk for an eternity and then talk a little bit more, and then he finishes with a summary of all the things he talked about. Every Sunday is like a little taste of eternal life, but not the good kind. It's definitely not hell, either, but maybe purgatory.

So occasionally we just need to play hooky, and last Sunday was one of those days. So we walked the dogs, gave them some rawhide bones, and guiltlessly left them as we headed off to Maastricht for brunch. A friend had introduced me to a neat place where they actually have a working mill with a cute bakery attached to it where you can get breads or dessert and a coffee and tea.


And they have a lunch deal where they bring you a basket of rolls and an assortment of meats, cheese, jam and butter, so we thought it would be a perfect little brunch.

The first order of business, however, was picking up a Sunday newspaper. One of the things we really miss about living in the U.S. is lazy Sunday mornings with breakfast and a newspaper. It's really hard to find any place that is even open to sell us a newspaper on Sunday, much less a place that sells newspapers in English. We did successfully find a Sunday Times (a British paper) and set off in search of our food.

After we got to the bakery and ordered, they may have actually forgotten our order, leaving us sitting there reading ridiculous articles about how Brits drink even more than Russians and 500 pages about Prince Harry in Afghanistan,

but eventually we got our food and it was goooood.

We don't know what kind of jam this was, but the fruit on the picture looked happy. And it was pretty tasty. So tasty in fact, that we didn't get any other pictures until...


Afterwards, we walked around Maastricht for a little while, looked at some shops, met a bunch of geese and then headed home. It was a pretty great Sunday morning. Wish we could play hooky every week, but getting smited by God might put a damper on our brunchy fun.