Waffles, Tears, and many Beers

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After the briefest of interludes, the blog is now beginning to catch up to the various ICE trains transporting me across continental Europe at an ever so hectic pace. I am now in Berlin, appropriately sitting amongst a larger variety of hair colours than nationalities. But before relating to you any East German adventures, it seems only right that I should re-trace the steps already made and the 1000 odd kilometres, Europe thankfully being metric, travelled. This little entry will as a result deal chiefly with the Belgian leg of our adventures...

Upon leaving the UK we once again spent a long time travelling across London and on the Heathrow tarmac and very very little flying to our given destination, Brussels, heart of the new (de-constituted?) Europe. We met some American fellw travellers on the plane, who we stalked and were stalked by for the next few days. Eventually providing them with directions to our hostel, beer, and some good times. We're very giving yeah? Brussels itself was interesting to a point and arguably belied its reputation as one of the more boring cities in Europe. Obvious highlights being beer, belgian waffles, fries, chocolate, beer, and also beer. In light of this a destination I can heartily reccomend is the Delirium Cafe, home to a world record number of beers, 2004 and counting. For dull NZerfiles like ourselves the 6 Euro bottles of Speights Wellington provided ample amusment, as did decent amounts of beer and the worlds worst cover band.

There were a few downsides to Brussels, notably the 200 odd French schoolchildren also occupying our hostel, who were little "$"&$%/&§$/&, and woke us up rather early two days running with their own peculiar brand of evil-smelling gallic shenanigans. I also can't get away without mentioning the severe hurt sufered and tears shed as a result of Arsenal's Champions league final defeat at the hands of a lucky, 12 man (nice Norweigan striker, I mean referee....) Barcelona. The only plus side to this being that I watched the game in rather bizzare and amusing environs, a small cafe in the heart of the gay district run by a small, friendly Albanian woman who laughed at my French whilst wiping away my tears (Abbie being too busy filming my tears which she found heartily amusing). Also present was a drunken, slightly paranoid Spaniard who commiserated extensively and bought me a glass (Glass!) of whiskey after the game.

Whilst in Belgium we also visited Bruges, which was pretty and full of canals and Catholicism. So much so that we almost took communion by accident at the Basillica of the holy blood (two drops of Christs blood present with us in a interesting looking medievel vessel). Following Bruges we hopped to Tessenderlo to visit the Family of Abbie's friend/ new brother GJ, which was thoroughly lovely although it unforunately put the old hostel into perspective in terms of relative levels of comfort.

The next day we headed off to in search of appropriate Leibensraum, to Germany......

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