Week 28 - Ali leaving, Terrence's birthday, 'La Louviere' trip

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31/7/2012

Today was that weird day when you wake up and realise in a few hours you’ll be leaving the only home you’ve ever known, all your friends, family, and memories behind. Well, at least for Ali, this was today. After she was all done getting ready, we headed off to collect the rest of the family in what was quite a teary encounter to say the very least. Today was just an amazingly sad day for all of her family and friends, and there’s not really much more to say about that. It just brought back memories of leaving the bay for me…. Although she didn’t get a 4 man haka.

1/8/2012

Chris and I headed off to Liege today to just get out and have a look at some new shoes and pants. Everywhere around Belgium are ‘Soldes’, and everything was way less expensive than normal. So we walked around, checked out shoes, couldn’t find any decent ones with low enough prices, so we went to a café and had a few beers. This then turned into getting ear piercings, and then chilling out in a park downtown where we just sat listening to Pink Floyd, and soaking up the sun.

4/8/2012

Tonight ol’ Tete was having his birthday dinner and celebrations, and so along I went. First came dinner at this Chinese buffet, which was okay. It was sweet as though, everyone bought him drinks and drinks there, so by the time he got to Grafitti, he was on a good buzz. There we used the 70 Euro Christelle and Wyn gave my and Jordan to get pretty well done. We spent it all too. Lets just say a danm good night was had by all, at the beach-party themed club.

5/8/2012

I was invited by Alain and Sonia (my first host parents) to go to ‘la louviere’ today, and so I took it up and in the early hours of the morning, we left for the 1.5 hour journey to la louviere. This is basically a world heritage site that was one of the first machines of it’s kind in the world, and the only one of its age still remaining. It was designed and built to help aid boat access around the wildly different water levels in Belgium. As you can imagine, you can’t go upstream in these gradients very easily. So in order to combat his, they designed a system that basically acts like a crane to lift the boats up and down simultaneously to the upper or lower water levels. After seeing heaps of cute little music groups boarding the banks of the river we were cruising down, we got to test out this thing first hand. It’s pretty crazy how it uses no electricity (all generated from water pressure), but it can still perform mammoth tasks like lifting huge boats. We finished the boat tours, listened to all sorts of music, and then sat down to a lunch of steak and frites.

Following this was the new version of this, which I remember I saw on the discovery channel one time… It basically the same concept, but the boats move on a diagonal line instead of a vertical like the old one. It can also carry 4x the boats, and cover far move vertical distance. It was awesome weather for the majority of the day, but it all packed up on the ride on the boat on the new boat lift. Luckily, it was the end of the day, and from the long day, long walking distances, and 3 hour sleep last night, I slept like a baby on the car ride home.

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