Water makes the heart grow fonder

Yeah sure, love can do that also. I guess. And a million other things, really, if you get down to it.

But I took two pictures with my cell phone (hence the poor quality, sorry) yesterday and this morning and usually these snapshots get lost on my cell and deleted whenever someone feels like playing with this phone that is not theirs. Anyway, that’s why I felt the sudden urge to post these.

Here is the river of Maastricht yesterday late afternoon:

It was incredibly grey. (By the way, one of these days I’m going to start spelling gray as any true American American English obsessed person would spell it. But it’s not time yet.) The water was grey, the sky was grey, the stone bridges were grey, and so were the houses. It was raining and my jeans were soaked through up to my knees – don’t you love it when that happens? – and I really just wanted to get to the bus stop and get into the warm, dry bus. But there’s something about this river that I’m crossing twice every day when I’m going to uni, even when it seems this unappealing at first sight.

The water seems deeper and riled up and colder than usual. It seems dirtier and older and all the grey suddenly makes sense when you think about how 8,000 years old human-made tools have been found by the river bed and that basically ever since those early humans (or human-like creatures) first discovered the advantage of setting up camp near a river, we have used the water as our trash can.

There’s an African proverb that says, Filthy water cannot be washed. So simple, and yet so true and devastating. You learn so much valuable culture on this blog, don’t you?

Even in the most depressing of weather, this river has an amazingly powerful quality to it. This river, man, it’s something else. I always have to stop and take it in for a while, no matter what else is going on.

Like this morning, among many other occasions, when I went to Maastricht early to get to the library before everyone else. Look:

15 hours lie between those two pictures (three of which I spent in the damn bus, eight of which I spent sleeping like a baby, two of which I probably spent eating).

I love rain and fall more than anyone you know, trust me, and grey doesn’t bother me. But still, the river in Maastricht is prettiest in the morning when the sun is just coming up and everybody’s getting to work on their bicycles and scooters and stores are doing some last-minute cleaning before opening their doors and everything is just so fresh and pretty that I, for one, feel like crying because I’m so overwhelmed by the infinite perfection of our world.

Note how different the water looks, though. So smooth and peaceful and velvet-y and blue and awesome.

Don’t even get me started on that 9am sky.

I love Maastricht, and to no small amount because of the beautiful river.

Just thought you should know this so that when you ever come to the area, you make sure to get to Maastricht early in the morning before all the other tourists arrive. If you wave to that singular girl standing on one of the bridges, letting the wind play with her hair and tearing up, she will smile and wave back at you.