Hotel Broel Kortrijk

Hé hé !

L'Amérique latine, nous voici nous voilà très très bientôt !!!
Plus que quelques heures avant le décollage...
L'excitation et l'appréhension sont 2 émotions qui se battent en duel en ce moment.

Le départ est prévu à 20h ce lundi 7 décembre de Paris CDG et l'atterrisage le mardi 8 décembre à Buenos Aires.
Nous en avons rêvé et ce projet va enfin devenir réalité.

Nous partons tout équipés : les 2 v ...

... city. Awesome architecture and canals winding around the city, as I took tons of pictures as always and just enjoyed the city.

Apparently Brugges had a movie made recently with it as a location; I'll have to check it out sometime. The main "art" piece I saw was a Madonna with Child from -the- Michaelangelo from Italy. It was quit nice, as were the countless other paintings and sculptures I saw in that ...

... and pasta dish with tomato sauce, mushrooms, celery, onion, garlic, etc. Fantastic and delicious. Afterwards, we met up with a few (mainly local) CSers at a bar near her house, where we played some board games and "werewolf" which wasn't too bad. Most of them were quite friendly and I had a nice time.

We came home not too late, as I was to go to Brugges the next day.

I just arrived in Lille just over an hour ago by TGV (in right around an hour from Paris, super fast). I got a bit lost arriving to my new host's house, but here I am, safe and warm. I'll stay here till Friday, when we carpool (two groups in two cars) to a big CS weekend meeting in Rotterdam. There I should be able to meet up with my host in Hague (about 20 or 30 minutes away).

The last few days were ...

After a bit of a hard night, we were all up at about 9am to check out of our hotel and go for a quick wander around Brugge, another UNESCO World Heritage Site. Often described as the 'Venice of the North', there are quite a few canals in Brugge, but as we discovered, there's even more chocolate shops - they're everywhere!
We walked down a stretch of road, only about 1km long, and saw about 7-8 chocolate shops, including ...

... driving) but the motorways were so good - 3 lanes each way, hardly any traffic at all, and really smooth. The motorways in France have a speed limit of 130kph in the dry, and 110kph in the wet, so either way they were faster and more direct than the meandering country roads with a 90kph limit.

Part of the way along, we came across team Les Pompiers, and they drove past us waving our aerial at us! We soon caught up and received it back though...at about 130kph!

We stopped ...

I saw the film "In Bruges" when it came out at the cinema a couple of years ago, and thought it looked like a beautiful city. So when Annabelle (the teacher in charge of me at school, and a good friend) suggested going for the day, Erin and I jumped at the chance.
The advantage of living so close to the Belgian border is that almost everywhere in Belgium is not much more than an hour away, and so we have no excuse not to see a lot of it!

We arrived in Bruges around 11.30 ...

... gaan in plaats van er over te lezen Er is lang over deze blog nagedacht, in ieder geval langer dan over de beslissing om naar Bolivia te reizen. De keuze van de titel was dan ook cruciaal en niet zo simpel. Gelukkig kon ik rekenen op de andere helft van het productieteam 'the girls with the curls'. Helaas haalde geen enkele titel van onze brainstormsessies de eindmeet, maar ik laat jullie toch even meegenieten van de afvallers ...

... war cemeteries, there's little sign that the entire area was practically nothing but a wasteland by the war's end in 1918. In the evening, I returned to the present, and walked all through Brugge. Took lots of great photos and basically just enjoyed being here. Tomorrow, I'll check out the remaining sites here in Brugge, then head for Ghent for a night. Some of the people I was talking with told me that it's even better than here, so I have to check it out.

... and other stuff (including even Stella), to the point that there are whole books devoted to discussing them all. I think I had allathese: Gueuze DeNeve, Timmermans Lambic Doux, Faro Vieux Foudre, Lindemans Gueuze, Boon Faro Mort Subite, Oud Beersel, Gueuze Vigneronne Cantillon, Jacobins Framboise, Cantillon Rose de Gambrinus, Boon Marriage Parfait, Hanssens Gueuze, Vander Linden Frambozenbier, Urthel Hibernus Quentum Tripel, Rochefort 10, Westvleteren 12 ...