Liège, Brugge and Festival La Semo

Maggy and Lena cooking lunch

Saturday was a crazy day as I ran all over Belgium catching up with different AFS returnees - five former AFS NZ students, from three different countries, in three different cities!

Anais and I woke up early and I packed up and shipped out. I caught a train from Gent to Liege and arrived at 11am, where Lena picked me up with Maggy in tow. Maggy is from Germany and lived in Porirua on AFS in 2009-2010, and was visiting Lena that week. We headed back to Lena's place and made pasta for lunch. I should point out that Lena made pasta for lunch, as her inability to cook is notorious! Then we just sat around talking until it was time to head back to the train station so Maggy could catch her train. We had tried to time things so we both spent a night together in Liege, but things got a bit messy and it didn't work out, but hopefully I can see her for longer in Germany sometime.

Lena, me and Maggy

Then Lena and I caught a train to Brugge, right back across the other side of the country via Gent again (see map below), so I could see Ophelie and Simon. Her parents thought I was mad, to them a 2hour train ride is a really long time, but riding in trains is still a bit novel for me, and I quite like to sit and look at the countryside going past. Compared to the rest of my travels, two hours seems like nothing! Ophelie was the first ever exchange student that I looked after for, back in 2008 when I got a phone call early in the morning and sleepily said yes without realizing what I was even agreeing too. She is from France, but studys in Canada and I was disappointed that I couldn't catch up earlier in the year, so when she came to Belgium to visit Simon in her summer holidays I went to say hello.

Simon and Lena at the cafe in Brugge

We met in a ridiculously expensive cafe in the square, one that obviously caters mostly to rich tourists and charged me 4.50euro ($9NZ) for a coffee and the pleasant experience of sitting on the terrace in the sun. Then we just wandered around for awhile, looking at the buildings and canals. I already visited Brugge in February, and while it was nice to see everything in the sun, I think I preferred going in the winter and avoiding the crowds of tourists, the place was packed! We had a look in some (very overpriced!) shops, and then had dinner at a Frituur. Frituurs are frie-shops, the Belgian equivalent of NZ fish and chip shops. In February I tried Frikandels with Tim here in Brugge and quite liked them, so it was interesting to learn from Lena that the deep-fried sausages are often made from the bad bits of horse-meat, rather than chicken, pork or beef! This time we had another kind of fried-sausage and some deep fried cheeseballs with our fries. Belgians are pretty into their deep-frying! Then we did some more wandering around, I had what will be my last speculoos ice-cream for awhile, and Lena and I caught the 9pm train back to Liege. Quite a random day, but catching up with everyone was worth spending six hours training around! I really love how domestic trains here only cost 5euro for under 26 year olds.

Dinner at the Frituur

On Sunday we headed into the Belgian province of Luxembourg, to a small town called Hotton that was hosting the La Semo music festival. All month the train stations have been packed with young people carrying sleeping bags and tents on their way to one of the many music festivals on here, so I was really excited to go to one myself. Along with a huge bunch of young people we piled into a tiny, decrepit train that slowly wound its way through the hillier and tree-covered region for an hour until we reached Hotton, the only train trip I've taken in Belgium that was pretty and interesting really. We jumped onto the festival bus and when it pulled up outside the festival, Lena jumped off, while I protested that some people carrying tents were staying on the bus and maybe we could stay onboard and get a ride to the campsite. However, Lena said we just follow everyone else, who turned out to be only one girl who was walking to her car. So back on the bus we went, and five minutes later we pulled up outside a field full of tents. Here Lena again made an ass out of herself, getting confused by people who were leaving the campground and asking them where the camping was. The look on the girls face who replied, 'just next to you, where all of the tents are, duh' was awesome. We found our friends, and pitched our tent next to theirs. Everyone here has those awesome tents that you just throw and they open all by themselves, so we were set up pretty quickly, and then it started to rain so we sat inside and drank a few beers before heading back to the festival itself. This time, we caught a ride on a horse-pulled wagon through the township, quite cool. Compared to festivals like Big Day Out and Rythem and Vines, security here was really lax, so the lines were small and we were soon inside.

Lena, Simon, Ophelie and I in Brugge

La Semo is a bit hippy-ish and green, they are big on being ecologically friendly and more people were running around in harem pants and barefoot than wearing shoes. Apparently La Semo means 'the seed' in Esperanto, a language that was invented in an attempt to create a world-wide language (more on Esperanto here, it's actually quite interesting!). Compared to the big Belgian festivals like Pukkelpop and Werchester, it's quite small and was only attended by french speakers. It ran for three nights but we were just there for the last. It had a big main stage and two smaller stages, and a whole lot of stalls that we spent a while checked out when we first got there. Food was around 5-8euro and drinks 2-3euro, so not great but not bad either. It was lightly raining for most of the afternoon, but it didn't seem to dampen anyone's spirits and it was still really warm, so we cruised around soaking in the atmosphere. It had a really good vibe, really relaxed compared to festivals in NZ where everyone is 'drinking to get drunk' and taking harder drugs, here everyone was still drinking, and there was heaps of pot being smoked a lot more openly than it would be in NZ (like only meters away from a couple of police officers that turned up briefly and then disappeared) but there was no one falling over drunk or puking on the sidelines or getting loaded into ambulances like you see at NZ festivals. Continuing with my theme of always commenting on the toilets over here, they had port-a-loo urinals which I've never seen in NZ, and ecologically friendly port-a-loos, which scared us at first because they use woodchips rather than water, but they were actually a lot cleaner than normal ones. Reading about 'the poo cycle' on the wall made me not want to eat food produced locally though!

Brugge and Gent are to the west, Liege is to the east

We only really watched three bands, on the main stage, Les Fatals Picards, which I guess I'd call an average rock band, then a reggae band, Danakil, and finally a kind of alternative/reggae, acoustic band called Tryo. It's an interesting experience to go to a festival knowing nothing about the acts that are playing and not understanding anything they are singing about, it makes you quite objective about their performances but its really weird to be in a crowd that's going crazy for a band whose name you don't even know. There was also a MC who kept coming out and doing 'simon says' type things, and of course I had no idea what he was telling us to do. The crowd went crazy singing this 'chaud boulette' thing and spinning around in circles. I knew boulette meant balls, which combined with the word chaud (pronounced 'show') to make me quite confused, but apparently literally translated it means 'hot balls'. I still don't get it.

Lena on the train

I quite liked all three bands, but I think the order was wrong and the reggae guys should have performed before the rock band. Tryo are famous enough for Lena's dad to shake his head when I said I didn't know about them, a five-piece band with a singer, drummer, sound producer and a couple of guitar players (usually no bassist!) who had a guest celloist and drummer along with them. The drummers were awesome, they played a whole range of percussion instruments, including tapping out some amazing beats on cajons (wooden box drums) with both their hands and brushes, and the cellist did well too. I haven't heard their recorded stuff (although I will hunt it down now) but I thought they did a good gig, they just looked like they were having fun and playing around with each other. At the end they played a random famous-although-I-can't-remember-the-name pop song and danced away to it, it was quite funny. The only bad point about the Tryo gig was that they pulled in a huge crowd and everyone got really pushy. We'd waited for over an hour near the front, so I wasn't happy about everyone trying to push in front of us, and a lot of people learnt the hard way that trying to take on someone from a country where girls play contact sport isn't a good idea.

my first Belgian waffle

Then it was around midnight, and they finished off with some fireworks and dudes in freaky costumes, and we walked back to the campsite and went to bed. The other nights went for longer but because Sunday was the last night they finished early, apart from everyone messing around with their own music back at the campground. I actually slept pretty well considering we were camping, and we got up around nine the following morning. By the time we had packed up, everyone else had packed up, we waited for the festival shuttle bus, and then waited for the hourly train back to Liege it was after midday, but it was really sunny and we weren't feeling so bad. We went back to the house and dumped the stuff, had showers, and then headed out again so I could pick up some stuff to take to Germany, meet up with Lena's friend and her brother, and try Belgian waffles for the first time. There are two types, Liege waffles and Brussels waffles, with the Brussels ones being softer. I am not really a waffle fan normally, probably why I've lived so long in Belgium without trying one, but the crispy cinnamon Liege waffle I had was awesome. We had a couple of drinks with Mathilde and her brother in 'La Cour St Jean', a bar in Liege that is famous for being the exchange student meeting point, every Wednesday exchange students from all of the different organizations come from all over Belgium to party here, a friend who did AFS in Brussels three or four years ago told me about it. Even though it wasn't Wednesday an Australian currently on exchange was sitting at the table next to us talking to a couple of Belgians who had only just returned from Australia.

Lena and Matilde at La Cour St Jean

We had dinner with Lena's parents, her dad is still as funny as ever and kept laughing at the way I say bonjour, so it's now a joke between us, and then we messed around all evening packing and sorting things out. This morning I took the train to Gottingen, Germany. I will miss Belgium, while the country has downsides like being really polluted and having a mostly flat, uninteresting landscape, and the racism and separatism that's really starting to show as the political situation worsens, it has a lot of good points as well, like really easy and cheap transport, friendly people, and a good friend being only 5 euro and a couple of hours away. I guess Liege is only a couple of hours away from Luxembourg too, but the train trip costs a lot more! I am looking forward to sitting around in Germany and doing nothing much, and it's quite cool to be going back to where my trip began just over six months ago.

I did take photos at the festival but on a disposable camera that I will have to get developed. Photos from Brugges and Liege are here.