thursday feb 16: mayke left to go to work before i woke up so we had our goodbyes the night before, even though i was going to see her in 2 days lol. so i cant remember if i wrote about this or not but when i was in amsterdam and went to the van gogh and rijksmuseum, i had lost my bike lock key (the original one) in the snow so this morning in maastricht i went to a key cutting shop and made a duplicate from the duplicate i had made in leicester. i was hoping it wasnt going to take days like how it did at timpsons cause that guy had to order in a special mould or some crap, but luckily it didnt, the guy cut the key and it works even better than the first duplicate i had made. then i went back to one of the karneval stores and bought some black fabric for my tail. the day before, before i went to the museum i went to aldi and bought some aluminum foil, but i only took a piece to make my tail out of and i gave the roll to mayke. so i didnt hang around maastricht too long because i didnt want to spend my first day in germany under a lot of stress from being lost or whatever other issues i may run into from being unfamiliar with the country. so i left maastricht at 10:34 am and followed the red and white bicycle route signs out of maastricht. they already had german town names on them so i followed them to the border. the first city i came to in germany was aachen, and this is where i ran into problems! First of all, ok it was flat, so that was good, but it was nowhere near as bike friendly as the Netherlands. They did have similar red and white cycle signs so that was good, and actually the mile markers were accurate to the nearest tenth of a mile so that was good too, cause it always drove me crazy in the Netherlands when they rounded to the nearest whole number so it would say 15 km, then 14, then somehow 15 again! But yeah once I arrived in aachen, I just tried to follow the road since I didn't have any cycling atlas. But I didn't know which color on the road signs were for the highway (things to remember In order to be more organized next time!) So I kept checking Google maps but I read it wrong so I circled around this strip of the main road a few times. One thing I did notice was some of the billboards (shops too) were in English, esp Marlboro. And I thought at first it was an advertisement for smoking but I thought oh no that can't be. I'll come back to that later (if I remember). So yeah I finally figured out which way to go and then I was back on track, although I had to now ride in the street. So as I was riding through the center (and its the afternoon) I saw a lot of people in karneval costumes! I thought, damn its only Thursday, everyone is starting early! Don't they have jobs?? as I got more into the center I saw a huge gathering for some type of street party. There I was riding along with my costume on my handle bars (which was real irritating, between getting blown in the wind and rubbing up against my wheel!), I so badly wanted to join them! So I didn't stop anywhere to sight see in aachen, just passed through. I did see though on a sculpture of a life size person in front of an important building, someone put a "Man in the iron mask" type paper mask over the statue, which I found very entertaining. ok ill have you leave you hanging with suspense here cause i am too sleepy to continue!
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