This is perhaps the most bizarre thing that I've seen in Maastricht, yet. Stranger to me than the countless couples donning matching fuzzy animal suits watching the prince of Carnival lower a giant statue of an old lady in the city center, weirder than when a full band all dressed in orange got on my bus one evening and proceeded to play a few numbers.

If you go for a stroll through the park built alongside the old World War II walls around the city center, you will stumble upon this massive statue of a dead giraffe. Sprawled across a giant cement podium covered in patchy grass and broken beer bottles, the creature is surrounded by other South African animals. A zebra, a springbok, and a penguin all appear trapped inside of a wrought iron cage. Apparently, it's a tribute to extinct animals, to remind us how fragile the planet is. If you walk further down a path, you can sit on a bench beside a huge statue of a very depressive looking bear slouching in his seat. Beyond that, you can find a few caged in fields where little gazelles and stout hoofed animals that look like they're related to goats are grazing. By that point, all you can think about is how sad they must be.

Keep walking and you'll find more of what you'd expect from Maastricht. There's a cast iron statue of a Dutch colonial officer, some little Dutch children set in stone, a small tower built of stone looking out over the city. It makes the modern looking tribute to that dead giraffe all the stranger, because there is no other piece of public art in town even remotely comparable.

And to think that I didn't think that I'd be seeing many more giraffes after I left Southern Africa.

On our last afternoon in Amsterdam, we wander into a little cafe with bright white walls and vintage movie posters in a language that I can't recognize. It's Swedish. The owner strikes up a conversation, asks me what I'm doing here.

"Ah, Maastricht, very chic," he says. "Everyone is so stylish."

And then he continues, without pause, "A bunch of farmers down there. All of them."

It's a good description of this town where you can stroll from designer shop to shop in the city center, walk twenty minutes from those carefully kept cobblestone streets until the road turns to asphalt, tidy three story houses turn to apartment complexes, and the sidewalks eventually turn into dirt paths and pastures. I can walk ten minutes from my dorm and find a field of cows.

Marseille, Madrid, and back to Maastricht.

We let discount airlines dictate our destinations.

It's not that there aren't places that I already was sure that I wanted to visit. I have to make it to Morocco while I'm in this hemisphere, I will go to London/explore the UK a bit, and I want to see Prague and Berlin. Hopefully, I'll be able to go back to see more of Spain and visit Italy, too. It's just that during the planning phase there were so many options, and we had this rare chunk of time available to us, so, seduced by the .01 Euro tickets, we let Ryan Air guide our course.

I'll try to recap the trip another time. For now I'll just say that the Mediterranean was gorgeous, I could feel the sunshine for the first time in weeks, and I wish that this program was set in Spain. I think that I'll try to keep heading southwards in my travels. That's always been the direction that I've been pulled.

It's February already. Classes haven't started, yet, but people are trickling into the dorms. I walk into the kitchen to find empty pizza boxes- some sign of life for a change.

It's Carnival in Maastricht. This entails elaborate costumes, speakers pounding the same steady beat across the streets all day through the night and until dawn. Parents drink little glasses of beer while strolling the central square dressed in costumes like clowns or popes or policemen, cattle or opera singers. The kids run around them eating fries our of paper cones dressed in mini-versions of the same intricate outfits. It reminds me of the Castro on Holloween except it's the whole city that is transformed, and it's a full family affair. There is serious preparation and investment here. Maastricht is famous for this event, this week every year when the people of Limburg province let loose and these tidy streets get absolutely trashed.