hi guys its us again speaking to you from paris. you may be confused. so were we. well like trav and jas we forgot our dour tickets and travs interailing pass in france. dour was amazing espically ice cube for us and the mass amount of drum and bass. well i kinda realised i wasnt really a camping person espically after seeing the toilets. arrrgghhh it was a nightmare. the weather the ok rained quite a bit. we met up with loads of our home friends and uni which was a right laugh and now we are shattered after having many [View Full Entry]

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I have been in Belgium now for four days and tomorrow leave for Den Haag (The Hague), Netherlands tomorrow. Seems only befitting that I will be out of the country on THEIR national holiday, like I did for France (was in Lux; returned to Lille, FR the day-after). Belgium is truly bilingual, and I've got neither French nor Flemish (AKA Dutch for the most part, with a national twist). But this is high tourist season and I have found English speakers in both Bruges/Brugge (that bilingual thing extends to how they name their cities, train stations, and street signs, too) and [View Full Entry]

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Oh my gosh--I was on Brussels 88.8 FM Radio, for a LIVE interview yesterday! I had just barely made it into the town center after getting off the train from Bruges, checking in at the youth hostel, and walking into the very fun "Use-It/Tourist Office for Young Travellers." There was a party going on in there, or at least the four people inside were super jovial and had apparently JUST moved their offices into the formerly-next-door-library's archive storage room (operation was previously headquartered in an out-of-the-way town called Ghent). A young woman working for the radio station was in there and [View Full Entry]

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Tongeren, Belgium July 7, 8 Leaving Corfu was sad. We had such a wonderful time in the warm weather, by the ocean. We were a bit surprised to land in Amsterdam where it was over 20 degrees Celsius cooler! We were picked up by Alexander…a great guy who is studying piano and percussion (and whose father was the head of one of the two festivals hosting us, and the organist for Jeff’s concert the next evening). It was a 3 ½ hour drive to Tongeren, Belgium. I should mention that the reason we came to Belgium before the rest of the [View Full Entry]

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Belgium…again! So, back to Belgium we headed! Somehow…we ended up in a town on the border of Holland and Belgium where we couldn’t get another train to Tongeren…so we called the Belgian Brass guys, and they brought a couple of cars to pick us up. It was a gorgeous day…so we all sat down at an outdoor café and enjoyed some coffee. Yes…there is a trend. Canadian Brass likes their coffee!! ;) We had a good time watching Willis, Jeroen, and Jeff be kids, and do magic with cards, coins, and lighters. Even our waiter came over and got into the [View Full Entry]

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Finally we have an opportunity to sit down for a few moments to let everyone know how our trip is going...things have been a bit crazy because we have only been staying in each new location for 2 or 3 days and therefore we spend most of our time siteseeing rather than sitting in a cafe. However, we just arrived in Amsterdam yesterday and already you can smell the weed all around town...we haven't been to the red light district yet here but we did see the red light district in Brussels while we were in Belgium. Belgium was really beautiful [View Full Entry]

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Bonjour tout le monde, J'ai pas donné de nouvelles depuis longtemps, car je suis pas mal occupée au travail. La ville de Gand était très belle. Maintenant, je suis à Vellereille, à l'abbaye de Bonne-Espérance. La première période du camp est finie. Les jeunes sont partis hier et les nouveaux arrivent demain. J'ai beaucoup aimé la première période. J'avais une classe de niveau 2B (12 élèves semi-débutants): mes élèves étaient chouettes! L'équipe aussi était super, mais presque tout le monde est parti (peu de gens font 2 périodes, car c'est trop fatiguant). Vous pouvez aller voir les photos ici: http://www.roeland.be/sejours_album_photos/98/fotos/ À [View Full Entry]

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Ok, now that I'm in Munich I have some time to get this entry done finally. I'm kinda falling behind here a bit because I've been on the move pretty much constantly for the past week or so. Promise I'll get the Amsterdam and Berlin entries done soon. As for Bruges, it's a beautiful city that is stuck in the middle ages as far as appearances. Pretty much all of the buildings in the city are very old or have been rebuilt to the same original specs. It is also a very small city as it only takes about 15 minutes [View Full Entry]

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We facebooked a couple people: parker's french sister and janna. our friend from the american bar the previous night. French sister was off in germany and unable to help. Janna generously opened her home. She is living in paris for the summer while she does biochemical chemistry (something about yeast). She stayed in our hostel one night after some difficulties with mother. Luckily for us, she opened her home. We hiked on over (it was only 20 minutes away from our hostel) and headed up five sets of stairs to reach their flat. We had such a great conversation with janna [View Full Entry]

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Saturday.. We went to the Van Gogh museum earlier in the morning. The museum is a smaller museum but it contained a lot of information about Van Gogh. It was interesting to read about his life, I learned many things about he I did not previously know. I was a little disappointed that many of favorite pieces he has done were not there. Although I have a new favorite, Blossoming Almond Tree. It was fascinating to see the actual work done by someone so famous. The actual brush strokes of all his pieces were breathtaking!! We then proceeded to the Tulip [View Full Entry]

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