DAY 3 - SUN 9/21 - MONSCHAU, GERMANY

After another wonderful Harling Brunch, we made our plans for the day.  They wanted to take us to Liege in Belgium, but since it was overcast and looked like rain, they thought we should do that tomorrow.  So today we would go to Monschau, a charming medieval town nearby, way down in a narrow valley of the Rur river in the hills of North Eifel.  It has a castle built in the 13th century, and houses made half of timber and half of slate which comes from those hills.  The houses were built over 300 years ago, when at that time the town was captured by the French and renamed Montjoie.

Mountains rich with slate...

Houses half wood, half slate...

The charming, roaring river running through it...

Street scenes...

Schmuck here means Jewelry.

A street person performing for euros...wait, who is that guy?!!

On the way back to Aachen we pass an area that gets bitingly cold and windy, and so the residents build hedges around their properties for some protection, with holes cut out for driveways, walkways, and windows.  It's clever but strange.

Then we pass the strangest sight of all...the 'Westwall' as it was called, also known as 'Dragon Teeth.'  It's a snaking line of stone pyramid-like structures built for the German defense before the war to protect against tanks and military trucks getting through except at check points.  They are so curious looking, possibly some kind of crazy art mixed into a natural setting, and at the same time so angry and forboding, in fact like monsters emerging out of the earth.  You get a very strange feeling when you see it as you drive along in the countryside, then it disappears, and then it appears again...it continues for many kilometers.