P.S

Today (21st July) is Belgium's National Day!

There are still people wandering the streets with nooses on...

Gentse Feesten

The Gent Festival started on saturday, kicking off with a parade through the city centre. The streets are PACKED as there are around 2 million extra people here at the moment!!

During the parade, these guys in white shirts were selling nooses. That's amusing even if you don't know what it means. I think I posted a while back about the nooses and what they mean for the people of Gent, but here's a recap; Charles V who became a Roman Emperor and was also the King of Spain, was born in Gent. He punished the citizens of Gent in 1539 after they revolted against him, making the city's nobles to walk in front of him barefoot with nooses around their necks. Since this incident, the people of Gent have been called "Stroppendragers" (noose bearers). They still wear the nooses in official parades and events today.


I'm not sure if this has cultural significance here but thought it was an interesting role-reversal!!

Check out this awesome 360º view of Graslei from the bridge; http://www.visitonweb.com/wikipedia/gent-graslei-uk.html and then imagine it packed out with lights and music stages, and FULL of people!!

Something like this....

Then on sunday evening there was a fireworks display on the Watersportslaan (a long water sports lane used for rowing etc). It was really neat as there was great music played with the fireworks, and it was a choreographed show including cherry pickers and really interesting fireworks. There were some really interesting firework techniques used that I'd never come across before - ones that stayed lit up in the sky for ages and looked like fireflies, others that looked like a disturbed nest of bugs, and big exploding ones that were like a pie chart of different colours. It was really neat.

Just 2 weeks

Two weeks today until we leave Belgium :( I'm actually really not looking forward to leaving Gent - I like it here! But also super excited about moving on to the UK.

Which reminds me - in case anyone was thinking about posting anything over here, it probably won't reach us in time before we leave. I'll email the address for Kinloch Lodge once we get there.

In other news, I have become irreversibly addicted to all things Speculaas. Not only do Belgians serve those spicy Speculaas cookies with every hot drink under the sun, but they also have;

* Speculaas paste (spreadable, like peanut butter, its GOOD)
* Speculaas gelato and icecream
* Speculaas milky bar chocolate!!
* Speculaas flavoured coffee

Speculaas is the word they use in Dutch, Speculoos is the French word. Just in case you were wondering about my spelling!

We're goin to Scotland!!

This is Hamish the Highland Coo. I think 'Coo' is just how the Scots pronounce 'Cow', *giggles*. We're going all the way to Scotland to see him. By the way, the photo is off the website of the tour we're doing as this hairy beast may be wild but is neither of our ideas of sexy. The company that does the tours is called Haggis Adventures (thanks to Amy for mentioning it or we'd never have thought of it) how kool is that?! They sound REALLY fun and we can't wait to get started!

We had a spare week to spend in the UK before starting work on the Isle of Skye and upon discovering the costs of seeing things ourselves, it worked out almost as cheap (and much more informative and fun) to do a wee tour. So we'll be seeing Edinburgh, heading up to the Orkney Islands, the Isle of Harris, a quick look at the Isle of Skye, Loch Ness and the William Wallace monument. Plus, the day before we start off from Edinburgh we will be going to see the Edinburgh Military Tattoo!! Super excited about that!

Mostly I am just intrigued with the idea of meeting this Hamish character. In fact, I have been chuckling about 'Hamish' meeting Hamish for so long now, that the real Hamish is threatening to gore me. Just look at him! How can he even see??

When Amy came to Belgium

Amy has been over here in Belgium for the past 4 days, so we did a bit of sightseeing. I've already posted 2 posts below about Gent and Brussels, this one's about Brugge and Oostende. Also, I'll put up all my photos on my flickr site, so don't forget to check there too! (link is to the right of this page).

We decided to check out Brugge for part of the day, and then travel to the coast so Amy n Mish could meet the North Sea. Brugge is a really lovely place, but also very touristy and hence fairly hectic.

Because I'm never normal

We kicked off our morning by visiting churches and the swans on the canals. (Remember my earlier posts about the swans in Brugge?? The Brugge people rioted against their French King and killed his adviser/best friend whose name was the French word for ‘long neck’. The people demanded more freedoms and rights, and the King agreed on the condition that the people not kill him, and also that they keep and tend to the swans that lived on the Canals, in memory of the King’s adviser ‘long neck’ – y’know, because swans have long necks! Apparently there was a big problem recently when avian flu came to Europe as all birds had to be caged by law, but the people of Brugge felt they had to still keep their historical duty to the swans, so they built cages over the canals for the Swans to live in and stay on the canals.)

We then went on a beer tour of a local brewery!! It's still right in the middle of town (see photo above), and is called De Halve Maan (The Half Moon). It's the last brewery left in Brugge, and apparently they have downsized a lot and only really keep it going by running tours through the place. Glad we could help by learning about beer! Plus, the tour came with a free taster...

And a great view of Brugge from the top of the brewery!

Did you know that Belgians make beer in champagne bottles up to 16 litres?!?!

The brewery also had a collection of beer cans from around the world, although NZ's representatives were not particularly impressive and included goram DB!!

We had our free taste of Brugse Zot (a blond beer 'the fool of Brugge'). Pretty good!!

Had a look in the Tintin shop (Tintin being the creation of Belgian artist Georges Remi)

Wandered along the canals

Then we moved on to Oostende in the afternoon.

Oostende is a coastal town, lots of fishing going on there.

Had a squiz at the beach, though it was fairly windy and cold (North Sea can get a bit rough!)

Then we headed back to Gent to have a canal ride in the early evening, seeing as we had missed out the day before. It was fairly good value at 5 euro for 45 min cruise!

It was cool for me too as I hadn't been on the canals before, so I got to see some familiar monuments (like the Castle here) from a different vantage point.

This is Gent's version of the famous Manneken Pis. Apparently it was around long before the tourist-pulling one in Brussels, and I think he is way cooler because he's got flowers too. No peeing boy statue is complete without flowers. Ok so maybe I should explain the peeing boy fascination of Belgium (I only just learnt about what it means). Back in medieval times they used to use the urine of young boys to soften leather, as it was more pure than the urine of all the beer-drinking adults. So young boys could earn a bit of money by selling their pee to leather merchants etc. Just as an aside, apparently the water supply from the canals was so bad that the people of Belgium drank beer instead. Even small children. So this is why they had to resort to using the urine of REALLY young boys, because once they were old enough to be weaned, they would have been drinking beer like the rest of the population!!

So, we ended up seeing 3 cities in 1 day. Bit of a whirlwind, but a great day!

Here is Hamish with his 17 cent (I kid you not) pudding. We even managed to work a dessert into the modest travel budget!!

Showing them lot around Gent

Friday I showed Amy n Mish around Gent. We were a bit more lucky with the weather, though it did POUR down in the evening (I think there was a shortage of cats and dogs so we got, like, rhinocerous rain). Anyway, here's some stuff we saw/did in Gent;

We climbed the Belfry tower of Gent. You can kinda see at the very top of the tower there is a dragon? (If you click the photo you can see the larger version). The dragon is the guardian of Gent. The current one up there is gold and weighs around 450 kg. The previous one is shown in the photo at the top of this post :)

A Belfry tower is a Flemish and French peculiarity apparently. They were used for spotting danger/fire etc in the city, as well as storing certain precious documents. Namely, the documents conferring rights to citizens (granted by the King) were locked away in chests such as the one above, to keep them safe. The idea was that if the documents were lost or damaged, the citizens effectively lost their rights. Hence they protected them pretty fiercely. They learnt the hard way that storing them too high up the tower meant they couldn't be rescued fast enough if there was a fire, so they were kept in a 'secrecy room' often under a false floor in the base level. Fascinating!

View from the top of the tower

This is an old Carillon keyboard. A Carillon was used to alert citizens to fires, storms, wars and such, as well as celebratory events. Its like a keyboard which rings bells in the tower, by playing levers and foot pedals. For me it is the ultimate instrument - a keyboard that rings massive bronze bells in a tower! In Medieval times, a ringing of bells from the lowest note to the highest note indicated that an attack had taken place. When we were in the tower, the carillonneur played the song 'Memory'. It was neat, and beats being attacked for sure!

We wandered around Gent and saw all the sights, and even tried a bit of Gent candy. This is a traditional candy shop called Temmerman. There's Hamish inside, stalking candy.

These are Cuberdons, well-known in Gent. They are little cones of raspberry-filled yummyness. The inside is liquidy and tastes a bit like candyfloss.

In the evening, we bought a couple of beers and sat down by the canal on Graslei to relax for a bit (we had done a LOT of walking). Amy n Mish got to try the beer Delirium Tremens (you know, the one with the pink elephants).

Hamish also discovered my favourite, Orval (its a trappist beer; those skillful, wonderful monks).

Kiwis in Brussels

On thursday Mish and I headed into Brussels to meet Amy at the Eurostar terminal (fast train which travels from London to Brussels through the chunnel!!) and then have a look around Brussels for the day. The weather wasn't that great but we managed to see a fair bit anyway.

First things first, of course we got down to the all important business of waffle-eating

And chocolate-eating

And then just viewing the chocolate when we simply couldn't fit any more in.

Went to see the (free) carpark rooftop panorama of Brussels

We visited the EU Parliament and Commission buildings

Where all that legal stuff happens. We got little lilliput-sized books that tell us what our rights are as EU citizens. Pity we're not EU citizens.

We visited a war museum at the Parc Du Cinquantenaire which is a massive park built to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Belgium's independance (including Congo, which was a colony of Belgium!!)

They had a wing of WWI uniforms from many countries, including NZ! We were impressed.

Big guns = big shells


Then we went to visit the Atomium

And we even got to go inside and between the electrons (by elevator, stairs and lifts)!!

You can see mini europe is out the front there. Unfortunately we didn't get to visit it due to the bad weather. But we could see all the mini buildings from the Atomium


Then after all that walking, we were pretty exhausted, so had to stop for refreshment (ie vending machine beer) before embarking on our train journey back to Gent. Good day!!!