Gift for the traveller inside me!

I just gifted myself a scratch-able world map! Waiting to scratch off more places as my journey of life continues ...

White Christmas!

Thanks to a lot of snow in the past few days, I'm getting to witness my first white Christmas!

I was very excited about my first Christmas in Europe, but to be honest, being abroad and away from family is quite boring. The university bears a deserted look as everyone has gone home for holidays. Of course, the Christmas market cheers you up a bit. Travelling somewhere does a better job :)

The three poor foreigners who were left alone got together and headed to Liège. I was fascinated by just two things: snow and .. snow! Hailing from a tropical area, wading through so much snow for the first time was a wonderful experience for me! 

  

Dinant

We had hoped for a last little trip before the cold set in. Turned out that it had already set in! In temperatures below freezing, we paid a visit to Dinant, a cosy town in French-speaking Belgium.

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The river Meuse runs North-South through the town. The eastern half presents a beautiful facade which includes a Gothic-style church and a fortified citadel on the hill above. The visit to the Citadel is quite interesting due to various reasons. From the top, the view of the town below is simply beautiful!

One also gets to hear interesting stories about the French and the Dutch crouching on either side of the river and hurling cannon balls at each other! It so happened that one of these canon balls landed into a part of the citadel and literally shook it up. And this presents the most interesting part of the visit (at least for me). There is a room which is entirely tilted at an angle. As I walked into the room, I found it quite hard to keep my balance as gravity and geometry were playing tug-of-war inside my brain. Then, I was asked to look at a pool of water which was placed at a corner of the room. Miraculously, as soon as I caught glimpse of the water, I was able to stand perfectly erect! Apparently, all our brain needs is a little reference plane!

My co-traveller, Krishnan, suggested that we visit the cave 'La Merveilleuse' up next. I didn't have my hopes high, for I imagined a cave to be just a hole in the rocks beneath the Earth's surface. But I was blown out of my mind once I stepped in! This was my first visit to a limestone cave! I had read about stalactites and stalagmites ten years ago in school. To actually see these beautiful structures which have grown gradually and gracefully over centuries was very humbling!

Every little town in the world has so much to say!

More photos from the trips : 

Dinant