Week 27 - Oostende Beach day, Tournai day trip

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24/7/2012

Today it was an amazingly hot day here, around 26 degrees, with no clouds. So off went Laetitia, Ali, some of her friends to Michaels house, and spent all day lying in the sun, and bronzing our collectively pale skins. First swim of summer here though. Ali’s friends Laura and Ludivine came with to have last minute chats, since she was parting us in a few days.

26/7/2012

Oostende is the town here, that houses the one and only beach here in Belgium, and today I was invited by Laetitia and Mamy to go chill there for a day. The finer details somewhat held conflicts with my natural starting hour to the day. Here we had a 5:30am wake up, a time I hadn’t had since last ANZAC day in little ol’ NZ, and for good reason. I’m neither a workaholic, a drug addict or have insomnia. These hours don’t exist outside today for me. Anyways, with backpacks with all our stuff we needed inside (including hardly-used bottles of Belgian sunscreen..) and headed to catch the three hour train to the far north of Belgium. Well, you can imagine the train ride wasn’t thrilling by any stretch of the imagination, but it was cool how the language kept changing, and the person announcing went from French, to Flemmish as we crossed the metaphorical border between the French-speaking Walloon region of Belgium, to the Flemmish-speaking Flanders part. Anyway, once we got there we hunted out some breakfast, and headed to the beach. It was a gorgeous day, and there were so many people were there it was kinda ridik. But there we lay, tanning (burning for me..) and just chilling for a few hours. After a while we made our way to lunchtime, we found a subway (which Laetitia had only ever eaten once, and Mamy NEVER). This came as quite a shock, Subway just isn’t big at all here.. But basically the rest of the day was spent In bliss. Just kicked back and relaxed and made the most of it. But of course, being a European beach, there was a more…. Relaxed dressed code than what I’m normally used to being exposed to on NZ beaches. So there, right beside us was a very well-endowed young woman chilling back on the sand, no sign of a bikini top anywhere. So that was a memorable differentiation I’d draw from this day comparing NZ beaches to their Belgian (European) counterparts.

28/7/2012

We all went as a family to the massive mall in Liege called ‘Mediacite’, of which I’d never gone before. It was great there, and around this time of year there are ‘soldes’ (sales) at almost every retail outlet, so this is the time to go on a spending spree. We hung around there checking out the shops, looking for present for Fabion. We finally made it back to the house, and during which Ali and Laetitia were at work, so we hung around until it was time to go pick them up.

29/7/2012

I was off to go see my Auzzie boys in Hugo’s home town of Tournai, and go park drinking today. Got there around there at 2 and met up with Andrea, Penny, Hugo, Kerian and Chris. Catching up on what we’d all been up to and sitting in the sun enjoying a few Jup’s was the aim of today, and after around 2 weeks of not seeing these people, it was really cool to just spend a day with them.

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