Chips or French Fries- the answer REVEALED!!!

For hundreds of years people have been arguing about whether to call deep fried pieces of potato chips or french fries. Chips is the english version whilst French Fries is the American. Today you will finally know what to call them................ Neither. Belgium is the home of the deep fried potato and in Belgium they are known as Flemish Fries.
So there you go you can now entertain all the people you know and correct those who are incorrect and if any one asks what a Flemish is, you can tell them its the Language they speak in Belgium not something old men cough up.

After our jaunt through Amsterdam we headed south to Antwerp. Here we found that Belgiums weather is more like that found in the United Kingdom, something that was not especially pleasing. We also found our warmest clothes as the day time temperature only reached 18 degrees. Which was still a struggle after our 35 degree days in Italy.

Our accomodation in Antwerp was interesting to say the least, one review said that it had character. I agreed that it had something but wasn't sure it was character. Our fellow guests were equally strange, Triona became best friends with a rather odd 50+ year old German lady, when she found out we were from Sydney she got very excited and asked if we had seen the pope. Triona told her we were away at the time and she seemed very upset and proceeded to give us all the details for where we could catch up with the pope for the next few years. Unfortunately Triona forgot to write the details down and wasn't keen on asking her again.
To be brutally honest there isn't much to do in Antwerp, after seeing most of the sights in the first afternoon we had to resign oursleves to seeing them again and trying to avoid the other guests in our accomodation throughout the day. Luckily for us we saw the main parts of Antwerp on the first day as on the second day we were there the town was shrouded in a very strange fog which made sightseeing hard but hiding from other people easier.

We left the fog for Bruges, which is one of the most visited cities in Western Europe. We wandered about its cobbled streets and saw all the medival archecture we could in our time there. Bruges is a very pleasant place however it is all a bit of a lie. Sitting in one of the squares, Triona started commenting on how well preserved all the medival buildings were. Unfortunatley Peter had read the guide book many times and told her that it was all fake and that its was actually all built in the 18th and 19th centuries to look like a medival town. This did not go down to well and Triona at this point decided that Bruges was a bit of a waste of time and that we should have gone somewhere that wasn't based on lies.
After the stange fog attack and finding out Bruges is a tourist trap from the 1900's, we headed to the Belgian capital hoping for something to give us back our mojo.

The answer was found in the main square if Brussels the Grand Place is absolutely amazing built in the 1600's the square is an elaborate specatacle put on by people of various degrees of wealth who spent much of thier spare time trying to out do each other. The square contains various buildings however the real deal is the numerous Guild Halls that line the square and contain various statues and symbols. The Guild Halls used to be places for merchants of various business activities to hang out and chat about how to make more money and other things. So when one group decided to put something up the others would check it out have some Flemish fries a bit of a chat and put something a bit better up. This continued and now the square is full of statues and golden symbols and other things that made the merchants feel good. Brussels also has Europes first covered shopping arcade opened in 1847, nowadays the price of anything in the arcade is so ridiculous that noone in their right mind would shop there.

After admiring the city of Brussels we decided that in the interests of education we should head out to the most popular African Museum in the world. Yes thats right the most populat African museum in the world is in Belgium.
In 1885 the King of Belgium "acquired" the area of the congo in Africa, the king of Belgium was a nice guy and built roads and schools and other facilities. Oh hang on, NO the king of Belgium over the next 20 years stripped the area of as much as he could taking rubber, ivory, gold and anything else he could get his hands on. During this time over 10 million africans died as a direct result of overwork, famine and the brutal treatment they recieved. This period is the subject of the book "The heart of darkness" by Jantes Conrad and is also featured in the midnight oil song Short memory - "The Belgians in the congo yeah short memory."
The museum was set up in the 1890's and is regarded as the last colonial museum in existence, the museum was last overhauled in the 1960's and is currently undergoing works to make it more modern but for now the museum is very politically incorrect. The museum is full of very intersting things that were "collected" (stolen) by people that went to the Congo. Many of these are religous artefacts and aren't the sort of thing you see in museums anymore. However the museum is also home to some of the most ridiculous specimens of animals ever seen. The museum has full sized stuffed Elephants, Giraffes, Lions, Buffalo, Zebras, Crocodiles, Gazelles and about 20 types of monkeys and 6 or so full sized gorillas. In fact if you can name an African animal its probable in there.
Most of the animals were "collected" (shot). By expeditions to the congo, however some more interestingly were brought back alive to be in an exhibition in 1900. Along with these animals the museum also decided that it was a good idea to bring 300 villagers from Africa to Brussels so they could set up little villages in the grounds of the museum. The photos in the museum show villages in the grounds and people wandering about in loin clothes, while men and women in full early 1900's formal clothes point and stare at them. All in all the museum although interesting was more than a little disturbing as this is how people thought just over 100 years ago.

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