Aachen

Hallo! I arrived at Yael and Andy's on Friday night. Charmed travel update - my flight was supposed to be Toronto-Frankfurt-Paris (yes, this is ridiculous, but whatever). Fortunately, we were delayed in Toronto for 4 hours, I missed the Paris connection, and Luftansa gave me a free train ticket from Frankfurt to Aachen instead. Win!

Saturday we were out and about shopping, prepping for some birthday parties, and our bike trip in Denmark. Some highlights from around Aachen:

 This was outside one of those dangerously awesome but expensive knitting stores that are everywhere now.

Also, it turns out that Charlemagne was from Aachen, set up the city as the base of his empire, and it's the 1200 year anniversary of his death. So it's all Charlemagne, all the time here this year. Here's a few hundred Charlemagnes outside the Dom, kind of terra-cotta warrior style:

Yesterday we hiked up to the Dreilandes-point, or something. It's the point where Germany, Netherlands and Belgium all meet, and it's about a 2 hour walk from where Yael and Andy live, mostly through rather nice countryside. Along the way we saw these concrete pyramid thingies, which are anti-tank barriers that the Germans put up all along their border in the lead-up to WWII. They're still all in place, for the most part, because it would be just too hard to remove them all.

And here are Yael and I at the Dreilandes-point! I am actually standing in all three countries at once.

This also happens to be the highest point in the Netherlands (327 m, I think it says. Not quite a mountain...).