Trip to Leuven

This weekend's trip was a little impromptu. We had decided to go to Ypres /Ieper, which is where the battle of Paschendaele took place (and there are Commonwealth and NZ memorials there as a lot of ANZAC soliders were killed there in WWI). But having then discovered that the memorials are out of the city centre and we needed to pre-arrange transport to visit them, we decided to leave that for another time and go to Leuven instead. I have been through Leuven twice already, once on the way to Aachen and again on the way to Namur. But we had never stopped there.

Leuven is one of the three University / student towns of Belgium - Gent, Antwerp and Leuven all have Universities. It wasn't a very nice day and rained several times, but we still got to see some great stuff. Our weekend trips seem to go as follows; someone suggests a place to check out, we all agree, we meet at the train station, someone is always late, we run to catch the train and always somehow make it, we arrive at our destination, make a bee-line for the tourist information centre to get maps, and then get some lunch before checking out all the tourist spots. Then we do lots and lots of walking, take many photos and do looooots of talking, before catching the train home once it gets dark.

Today we had lunch at an Italian pizza place as there were 5 Italians travelling with us. They are hillarious. They really do speak with the crazy hand actions and intense intonation of their words, like we see on TV etc. Anyway lunch was nice, we got free olives as a starter and also some kind of liqueur shot after our meal - its called Amaretto and it tastes very almondy. So we staggered out of the pizzeria feeling quite good. We saw the historic buildings of the city, the Botanic gardens (which are beautiful, and also they have NZ natives like Kowhai!!! naturally I was very excited about that). I also met an Australian in the middle of the town square. They are as rare as NZers around here. We were all being tourists and taking photos with a statue (as you do) and talking about how we were going to find the information centre, when this guy walks up and tells us (in an Aussie accent) how to find it. So of course that then lead to much banter about Aus and NZ. And I was buzzing for the next half hour. Who'd have thought I'd be so happy to meet an Aussie?

We also visited a statue of Erasmus, a Dutch philosopher after whom the ERASMUS exchange program is named. We also visited the original post office, the fish market, lots of churches etc. All in all a great day! AND we saw a guy who looks just like Anthony Hopkins on the train home. And it was a double-decker train!

Hope you all had a good weekend too. xxx nelle