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Liege, Belgium On our second full day in the Netherlands, as part of our orientation and jetlag adjustment, we were taken thirty miles south of Maastricht to Liege, Belgium. Liege is important to us because most of our excursions by train have to change here. For example, to get to Brussels, we change trains in Liege. Also, to get to Luxembourg or Paris we change trains in Liege. I have included a few photos of Liege on this page. |
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One of the first buildings we saw in Liege was the palace. It is known as the Liege Palace. |
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From the palace, we walked to the River Meuse. Scattered along the river for at least a mile was a huge outdoor market. You could buy anything you wanted here. This is looking up the river generally toward the south. |
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This is looking down the river in the other direction. You can see the market stalls all along the river bank. This river flows into the Netherlands and becomes the Maas River. |
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Markets are also places that attract a wide range of musicians. Here is a fellow playing some type of flute. While he plays, a friend would stop people and try get them to buy a CD the musician had produced. |
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While in Liege, we were taken on a tour of St. Barthelemy's church. It was in the process of being restored. What I found most interesting was this baptismal font. It sits on 12 oxen as did the basin in Solomon's Temple (according to the biblical account) and as do the baptismal fonts in temples of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. |
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Here is the entire font. It is not large enough for total adult immersion, but would work well for infant sprinkling. |
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If you look carefully, you can see steps at the bottom of this photo. To get to this point, we climbed (as the sign said) 374 steps up a rather steep hillslope. Although we were exhausted when we got to the top, we did have this wonderful view of Liege. You can see that it sits in the Meuse River Valley. |
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Like most cities in Europe, Liege also has an opera house. This is it here. It is not unlike the Bolshoi in Moscow, Russia. Although it appears to be smaller. After all, Bolshoi, means "big." |
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This is a view of the Boulevard de la Sauveniere in downtown Liege. |
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This is looking the other direction along the Boulevard de la Sauveniere in downtown Liege. We liked Liege, but found it to be not as clean as cities in the Netherlands. I also found Aachen, Germany, to be cleaner. Liege is an old mining city. We were told that the mines have closed and the economy is not very good. So I guess there is less money to keep the city clean. |