I’d hoped to explore Liège a little during the day but the weather was not kind and I was a little slothful.
The imaginatively-named Liège Youth Hostel is probably the grandest youth hostel I have ever stayed in. My motivation for booking it was simply that it was quite cheap and that I could have a private room so I could work in the afternoon. In Zürich, for example, I booked the cheapest room I could find simply because I don’t have any spare kidneys. In Graz, I had a private room in the functional but slightly sterile a&o hostel next to the station, and of course in Plzeň the hotel was cheap and grand. The less said about the accommodation in Nürnberg the better, really — apart from the bargain price — especially as they wouldn’t let me check out half an hour later to accommodate a lesson.
Anyway. All this is waffle, if you’ll pardon the pun, as nothing had prepared me for the splendid building I find myself sleeping in. I’d noticed last night while checking in that my surroundings were slightly grandiose — I have never stayed in a youth hostel with vaulted cloisters before — but time was of the essence and so I didn’t have much time to stand and gawp, but today as I headed down for the inclusive breakfast buffet (v good non-meaty, bread could’ve been a little fresher) I took a moment to take in my suroundings.
The Récollets Convent, or Convent of Jerusalem, was founded in Liège at the end of the 15th century and was home to 80 or so Franciscan monks who lived happily in their building within the old city walls right up until the French revolution. The church next door, now the Church of Saint Nicholas, was built in 1710 and replaced the church that had stood there previously, until it burned down in 1691. There was then a lot of intervening history until 1897, when the Order of Friars Minor Recollect was dissolved by Rome, and then there was more history.
The key point is that after lots of history, the north part of the convent was renovated and turned into a youth hostel inaugurated in 1998, named after Georges Simenon, the Belgian writer most famous for the detective Jules Maigret, who is also remembered in the eponymous street it stands on. It has its own cloistered garden. My room is on the second floor, is self-contained and has a private balcony which overlooks the garden, so I feel quite pious and at the same time like I should be keeping an eye out for anything suspicious.
The adjacent Church of Saint Nicholas was not open for exploration when I tried as were quite a lot of the non-central churches.
My start of my early-afternoon excursion, announced by the bell tower and carillon, was slightly damp. I wandered across the Meuse and made it back to Place Saint-Lambert, but the market did not bestow the same charms as last night when I saw it in the dark. This did nothing to deter me from downing a quick vin chaud to provide sustenance for me to get via the ice rink to the cathedral, which was being prepared for something and therefore slightly difficult to look at as there were flight cases and people erecting things everywhere.
The nearby Collegiate Church of Saint Denis was occupied by a shouty drunk man who expressed drunk shouty chagrin at my decision to take photographs of the gaudy while he dried his clothes on the back of a pew and did some stretching exercises on the font. Still. There’s a first time for witnessing everything.
I let myself down for lunch and had a regal burger in the branch just over the road from the market — it had a macaroni cheese patty which I thought I needed to try — procured a fridge magnet and then made my way back to my grandiose hostel for work in the afternoon. At 5pm, Mr Student came to whisk me to Ans, where Mrs Student had prepared a veritable feast for the evening and we had sparkle-fizz and nibbles. I took the bottle of Essener Christmas beer to share, and it was very very lovely indeed. There were chocolate and caramel notes in the beer, which me quietly wish I’d been waved off with a case of the stuff.
Deposited back to my hostel in the evening post-yums, I had little motivation to waddle back across the river. That was a shame, because I had quite fancied finishing my sparkle-tat pilgrimage with a Liège Christmas Market cup of vin chaud, but the weather was dire, I was tired and and in any case I need to be organised for tomorrow.
