I use the secret power of franglais to swap books (mine are coverless and beat up while hers are in perfect condition) with the YHA owner. As every veteran traveler to France, or to this French-speaking part of Belgium, has learned, perfecting your use of franglais is the best alternative to not speaking perfect French. When I first came to France, not long after my school years, I had a high intermediate ability with the language. I could read it just about perfectly and understand practically everything said to me, but in speaking I would invariably mess up a bit, blundering gender, pronounciation and grammer. The persnickety character of the French (and these Wallonians seem to be even more fastidious -- Hercule Poirot isn't Belgium by accident!) simply demands that badly spoken French is snubbed. Miss a particle and they may need to ignore you just to keep up the honor of the language.

Fortunately, the non-perfect French speaker has the secret of franglais to rescue him. Here's how it works, and believe me, this is an expert revelation. You must frame any inquiry with enough French to pay hommage to the language, but then toss in enough English to make it obvious that you are hopeless at speaking French. Even if you know how to ask your question in perfect French, you must start and stick with franglais, or else the highly trained aesthetics of the Frenchman will insist that the conversation remain pure, and you will invariably fail. The goofier you make your sentences sound, the better! Honestly, I often try to come up with the funniest melange I can think of, and this seldom fails to open a French smirk into a grin. Once I get that I know that the French will be as friendly as anyone else in the world. My French is terrible now and I get along much better than I used to in this part of the world.

Liege is a dirty, seedy mess of a city and in many ways I like it the best of the three neighbors I'm going to describe in this chapter. I would never want to live here but it is an unexpectedly great place to visit. I love the churches and the old, dark, narrow streets, and the views along the river and up on the bluffs. I see no museums and only one "attraction", the baptismal font made by Renier d'Huy, one of "the seven wonders of Belgium". Nice, but this is exactly the type of thing you'd see ignored in a corner of the Louvre.

It helps that Liege is in a festive mood. For three or four days of my stay there are people dancing in the streets, forming long snaking human chains, or marching behind floats and bands whose enthusiasm makes up for their extremely limited repertoire. I repeatedly see people dressed as witches and one guy in wizard getup who carries a rooster staff. It's fun to not know what's going on and to indulge the fantasy that the citizens of Liege are always like this, but eventually I learn that this is the Festival de Wallonie. A music stage is setup and most of the population does their best to remain intoxicated.

Aachen, Germany is a very short train ride away. They are also having a festival when I visit, but other than that the place couldn't be more different. Aachen is a tidy, prosperous little Germany town, as neat and orderly as Liege is chaotic. The big draw here is the exquisite Aachen Cathedral, originally part of Charlemagne's imperial palace, and the treasury that contains many famous reliquaries associated with Charlemagne. The reliquaries are fabulous, but I'm always extremely dubious about the body parts inside. I'd love to see someone do comprehensive DNA testing of all these crazy body parts of kings, saints, and biblical figures. In Turkey alone, I saw more body parts from John the Baptist than could possibly have originated from one body.

Maastricht, Netherlands is the third neighbor, halfway between the other two in terms of order and cleanliness. It's a very likable place and deserves to be more popular with tourists. As in York, Rothenburg, and a few other European towns, you can walk atop the old city walls, and this is something I always love doing. I pop into the Bonnefantenmuseum and the Natural History Museum, but mostly I just enjoy strolling around, both in and out of town.

BTW, I don't remember if I've vented about this before, but I have to say that the Dutch tourist offices, known as the VVV, get my vote for being the least helpful in Europe. Not only do they offer very little to the tourist but they want to charge an outrageous fee for every crappy little scrap of paper in their office. It's all the more glaring down here because the Belgium tourist offices, just down the road, do an excellent job.