Into the mountains

As the train took us east from Leuven to Verviers the land slowly rose up and then turned positively hilly. We started to see more of towns than just the rows of little brick houses with their strangely elongated back yards - the small hills allowed houses and Churches to rise up above the countryside and stare down at us. By the time we reached Verviers the track even needed to cut through tunnels and arc across gulleys. Verviers itself is set in a valley, of the Vesdre River, and with the visible presence of houses lining the cliff tops looked much larger than Leuven, which is so flat you never see more than the next block, even though it is only half its size. Verviers took advantage of its days as an international powerhouse in the textiles industry to build a few nice monuments and statues, an investment which paid off as it left it a pretty enough town even hundreds of years after its heyday.