Belgium

---

Sunday 8th June - Monday 9th June

We arrived in Belgium about 4pm, we were about an hour late as there was an accident further ahead which meant we were rerouted to another station. This caused us a few issues in getting to our hotel.

Once we were settled in we went into the tourist area and ha a look around. Here we got to see Grand Place, Marquis Pis (a small statue of a boy urinating, one wonders why it is so famous,) and the Brussels Cathedral. You can see most of the sights in a couple of hours so we didn’t need too much time.

All this sight seeing had made us weary so we stopped for a couple of good Belgium beers and some food. Brussels was quite a bit more relaxed then Amsterdam so the slow pace was good.

The next day we headed for Ypres / Ieper (it has two names one assumes its French and Dutch respectively.) It was here in 1917 that the allies fought a series of disastrous battles. It tends to mainly known as Passiondale which is a small village about 10km away from Ypres. The morning of October the 12th is the bloodiest day in terms of New Zealand casualties with some 846 killed and over 2000 wounded.

Once in Ypres we had a look around. The town was quiet, pretty and slow paced. We were staying in the Old Tom hotel were the clerk putting us on the third floor. The Old Tom hotel has no lift, I wonder if I spoke French whether I could have got a ground floor room.

That afternoon we headed to the Tyne Cot commonwealth war cemetery. This is the largest commonwealth war cemetery in the world with 12,000 graves (8,000 of then containing unknown remains.) It contains quite a few New Zealand graves, and was very poignant.

We came back to town and waited till 8 pm to go down to the Menin gate. This is a large gate that is a war memorial to commonwealth troops (not so much for New Zealand as they created their monuments closer to the battlegrounds.) At 8pm every day the local fire brigade play the last post and guest lay wreaths. They have done this every day since 1929 (excluding a lull during the second world war.) It was good to see and was quite sombre.

The next day we headed off reasonably early to the train station to our next stop: Paris.

---

Comments

[brendaandshaun]

Language Correction
The langage spoken here is Dutch not French