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Published: August 24th 2006
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Bonjour tout le monde!
After a great week in Paris with Corinne & Julien, we had to go to Belgium to recover... & what a great place to do just that!
We took the TGV (high-speed bullet train) to Brussels from Paris in under an hour & a half and met up with my brother Andrew & his girlfriend Lynette who were over from London for the weekend. Andrew spent a year in Brussels on an AFS student exchange about 10 years ago, so we all decided to meet up together with his host family & spend the weekend at "Hotel Van Kan".
Now, it must be said that my brother & I haven't hung out together for almost 5 years, so the weekend was shaping up quite nicely thanks to many a beautiful meal cooked by Christine, several bottles of 20 year old French wine saved especially by François, and the regular trips to the beer section of the local supermarket. They were so welcoming to us all, and it was a real privilege to see Drew with his family - not much has changed after 10 years (he's still on dishes!). We also shared a meal
with the grandparents of his host family who were so excited to see him.
One of the highlights of the weekend was the 'Tapis de fleurs' or Flower Carpet that is laid out in the main city square (the Grand'Place) - this only happens for 3 days every 2 years, and it happened to be the weekend we were there so we were very lucky. It takes up the entire square (about the same size as Manners Mall) with plenty of room aside for the typical tourist stalls etc. To recover, we had to get our strength back so needed to eat waffels with cream & fresh berries... and poor Lynette was so overwhelmed she needed two.
The next part may be boring for some of you so keep scrolling down to the mussel story...
On Sunday François took us to Leuven (yes, just like the Belgian bar in Featherston St). It's a university town with beautiful architecture but thanks to an Iggy Pop / Pet Shop Boys concert (go figure!?) many of the streets were closed off. We also visited a "Béguinage" which is like a compound for unmarried / widowed women who lived together and
devoted their life to charity work and God (similar to nuns, but not). It was a place of safety as it was locked at night, and many of these women were quite well-off thanks to family money etc. It was so peaceful and somewhere I would love to live, with cute bridges and side streets etc. The buildings are owned by the university and have been kept in really immaculate condition, so they are now rented out for gigantic sums as it has become a World Heritage site.
We also went to Mechelen, a place they call the "city of ladies" due to the political influences of women over the past 500 years... needless to say Belgium used to be joined with the Netherlands and most of France under the Spanish rule of Charles V - this is the same king who bankrolled Christopher Columbus to discover the Americas, so he pretty much owned most of the world. He couldn't be everywhere at once so he sent his family out to the corners of his kingdom to govern, and Mechelen (read Belgium) at the time was governed by his sister. Voilà!
After such heavy history lessons, the 6
Drew showing how it's done
The rule is not to use a knife n fork, so you have to use a mussel shell like tweezers to pull the next mussel out of its shell - easy! of us required 9kgs of mussels, a heap of fries and of course homemade mayonnaise to get our strength back. These mussels are much smaller than NZ mussels, and in fact I much prefer them (don't tell Scott I said that). They are much less chewy and more flavourful, but mini crabs still get caught inside!-it's only because they are much smaller than the NZ green lipped muscles-Scott.
Monday, François lent us his BMW and (thank God) his GPS & Scott drove us to Walibi, an amusement park in the Flemish speaking part of Belgium, but much better than Rainbow Springs. For die-hard freak fans, let me just explain how we almost lost our lunch... Andrew & Lynette had this race thing where you had to go on all the rides as quickly as possible, even after super jumbo triple meat burgers with large fries & coke downed with waffles and coffee. Even at 10 in the morning, being dropped 100 metres freefall wasn't my idea of fun. But I hung in there and kept up with them most of the way, and I didn't lose my lunch. Unfortunately it rained solidly from midday to 5pm (welcome to Belgium),
so the water rides didn't have the same attraction.
Tuesday was a day we will never forget. François' father Jean took us on a guided tour of the WWI battlefields around Passendale across to Ypres and up towards Brugge. Passendale was the sight of modern NZ's largest disaster, and it wasn't even on our soil.
The first stop was Tyne Cot, a British Commonwealth cemetary where thousands of allied soldiers lie in rest. There are also memorial walls with the names of 35,000 soldiers whose bodies were never found. When you first walk in, the thousands of white gravestones hit you with such emotion. Neither of us could hold back the tears, it was so overwhelming. Families keep visiting their loved ones, and the entire graveyard is strewn with the red plastic poppies you get on ANZAC day.
We then went to Ypres, a town that was totally demolished in WWI, but has since been fully rebuilt to look original. We saw Menin Gate, like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, that has the names of all the Commonwealth soldiers (mostly Aussie & Canadian) who fought to free Ypres. The Belgian RSA play the Last Post there
every night at dusk.
Ypres also has a fantastic museum called Flanders Fields, situated in the old Cloth Hall that has since been restored. There were pictures, artefacts, stories, memorabilia, letters etc that were so moving.
Yet again, any upsetting moment must therefore be cured with food, so we went to eat the most tender pork knuckles I've ever eaten (yes, with fries & mayonnaise) downed with the local specialty - beer! This gave us enough courage to drive to the town of Brugge (literally "bridges" in Flemish) which is nicknamed the Venice of the North. So we took a tour on a canal boat, and saw another Béguinage (the widows compound) & enjoyed our time in Brugge, if a little too short. Somewhere we'd love to go back & visit.
Other highlights for us were Pierre Marcolini, the chocolate truffle kings of Belgium - it is like visiting a jewellers shop, where the staff wear gloves to handle the truffles and everything is about 35 - 45 €uro a kilo. YUM!
Plus Antwerp where the real jewellers are; sadly for us we came away empty handed, but I guess it means we'll have to go
back later on for a diamond-gathering holiday!
Did I mention the chocolates?!?!
Anyway, time for us to sign off. The next installment is Amsterdam, so get your popcorn ready folks... it's gonna be a doozy!
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Dad & Lydia
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The Big 30
Whereevr you are Sarah, have a wonderful birthday. Wish we were there. We will be celebrating on Saturday over a sumptuous lunch at Coyote. Love You xoxoxo