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.