Blogs from Oostende, West Flanders, Belgium, Europe - page 2

We travelled back for our night in Oostend after our relaxing beach getaway. Oostend is at least in the guidebook.... It definitely has more people, and more young people, which is neat. But we're only in town for the night, and we're q bit beached out, so we just walked around. And played a round of mini)golf. I managed to beat Neil (for the first time at anything golf related) 52-58 thanks to a waterhazard that he couldn't seem to get passed... There was a group of people ahead of us about our age that played like they'd never held a club or a stick before in their entire lives. I wonder if that's a common trait of football-centric nations? Well, we leave Belgium tomorrow to meet Amy in Paris, so I'd might as well male ... read more

Today is the last day to use our eurrail pass. Though it was quite cloudy and chilly we made plans with the Clasens to meet at the train station in Oostende. We biked to the Leuven train station and managed to catch the 9:35 train (only because it was 15 minutes late otherwise we would have missed it). The train was packed but it was an easy 1.5 hour trip and the kids were all good; they must be getting used to it. We arrived shortly before Zoe and Christian and so we got a cup of coffee. Once together we walked along the street to the beach. Though the town isn’t very pretty but the beach was fairly empty (probably due to the weather) and the kids had so much fun running around and playing ... read more

lots of trains today, and i mean lots. checked out of the snuffel (sob) at 10am, after a brilliant few days there. if anybody is staying in brugges anytime soon, i really cannot recommend it enough, its a brilliant place. the staff are all brilliant, even if i did manage to kinda insult one of them. a girl from yorkshire strangley enough, complimented me on my orange exploding dog shirt, and then said 'this is where you say nice shirt to me', to which i replied, for some stupid reason, 'yeah, but...'. good work bills, good work. but yes, the staff are all brilliant, the hostel itself is great, even if the showers are a bit mad. you have to hold down a chain for the water to flow. its a bit mad in all honesty. ... read more

So it's still Saturday, the second day of my time in Belgium. It's about 3:30 or 4:00 in the afternoon. I've been touring Brugge all day, there's only about an hour or two of light left...what to do next? Hop a train to Oostende. Oostende is a port city on the North Sea and it is very close to Brugge (everything is close to everything in Belgium). I thought the town was great. Didn't spend much time there, just long enough to walk down to the beach, dip my hand in the North Sea (just to say I did), and walk back to the train station. On the way back to the station we did manage to stumble upon a row of stands selling fairly cheap seafood...it was awesome. Again, I won't go into too much ... read more