January in Luxembourg Part II

The Sphere Room at the Trans Ardentes Festival, Liege, Belgium

The second half of January hasn't been particularly interesting, I caught a really terrible cold and spent the better part of two weeks either in bed or moping around the house. I did make it out a couple of times, mostly just to Liquid for live jazz during the week, and once on a Friday I went out with the intention of having a big night out dancing, but I didn't make it further than the free jager party at Scots.

Josh, me and Naz at Jager night at Scots bar, Luxembourg

The highlight of those last couple of weeks was going to Liege, Belgium for the Trans Ardentes electronic music festival. Josh and I drove up on Saturday afternoon, its only a little over an hour away, and after picking up Lena we headed just over the border to Maastricht in the Netherlands for a brief stop to go shopping and get KFC for lunch. I'd been to Maastricht once before, for a day, and it was freezing cold so we didn't stop to look around much.

The ceiling in the Elektropedia room, Les Trans Ardentes festival

Then we just headed home, fluffed around getting ready, and caught the bus to the festival. Having been sick, and being very tired from a couple of sleepless nights with crying children, I wasn't really amped until we got on a packed bus full of young people who were definitely much more in the party mood than we were! The festival is held indoors, at a big kind of hall, with concrete floors and steel sides and roof. It has separate sections, so there were four stages with different DJs performing at different times. Josh and I were both pretty into the Cube Room, which had kind of electro lounge music, more than the others, but the three of us, and Lena's friend Marion (who is awesome, I know her from past visit to Liege and the La Semo festival) and her friends, spent the night moving around quite a bit.

Lena, me and Josh at Les Trans Ardentes festival, Liege, Belgium

Like all the festivals I've been to in Belgium, you have to swap cash for tickets that you then swap for drinks. I guess it seems like a good idea, not having to mess around with money at the bar, but it really just means you have to join another really long line, and you can only get the tickets in preset amounts that aren't divisible by the cost of drinks, grrr. But, being sick (and broke!) I had resolved only to have a few drinks anyway. The other annoyance was having to pay an extra 2euros to be able to use the bathroom - not every time you went, you just had to pay for an armband that allowed you into the toilets all night. How stupid is that? Just raise the ticket price by 2euros! And sexist too, because there were free urinals outside for the guys. And even though it was smokefree, once the crowds built up everyone started smoking inside, so I was constantly afraid of getting burnt in the middle of the dancing crowds.

Boys Noize at les Trans Ardentes festival in Liege, Belgium

But, rant over, the festival was awesome, I'm now totally addicted to electronic music festivals. I don't think New Zealand has anything comparable, not with 12 000 people coming through the doors and with such high standards of DJs, like Birdy Nam Nam, Cassius and Boys Noize. The German DJ Boys Noize was the big drawcard for me, he's been my favourite DJ for about three years, and I was gutted to miss him playing at Rhythm and Vines back in New Zealand just after I'd flown to Germany last year! He played at 1.30am, and by that stage I'd been dancing for over five hours and I was dead tired and aching everywhere, but I stayed on my feet for the whole set, he was really amazing and actually better live than recorded. I couldn't say the same about Birdy Nam Nam, I thought they were terrible live and I didn't stick around! It must have been around 3.30am when we called it a night, Josh was really the worse for wear and Lena and I were both shattered. But, it was an awesome night, and one of my favourite experiences here in Europe.

Lena and Josh at "the cool bar" in Liege, Belgium

We slept quite late the next day, only dragging ourselves out of bed sometime around 1pm to find Lena's mum had laid that table with pastries and fruit for us for breakfast, so cute! We wanted to show Josh around Liege, but we were all so tired and it was absolutely freezing, colder than I've felt all winter so far, so we kind of dashed quickly through the centre into what me and Lena call "the cool bar" where we always go for a drink, and then we ended up playing a couple of games of pool before heading to Quick for dinner and then jumping into the car to head home. It was so cold I couldn't even bear to take my hands out of my pockets to take photos all day. An hour later with the car heating going full bore, I still couldn't feel my hands or feet, and just as we crossed the border into Luxembourg it started to snow.

Ollie playing dress-ups. Girly or what!

The cold weather continued the next couple of days, with highs of about -1 and lows of about -4, so even though more snow didn't fall, what we already had stuck around. I spent Monday recovering from the weekend, and running a ton of errands around the city. I babysat that night, putting the kids to bed myself which is uncommon. Unfortunately, Pepi's 'Baby Mozart' stuffed monkey was forgotten in Rogier's car and went off to him. Trying not to show my panic, I went through the whole bath/bed routine as normal, and it wasn't until he was lying with me in bed that he realised Baby was missing. I told him Baby had wanted to go to work with Papa, and he only cried for a couple of minutes before settling down, a pretty good outcome considering how attached to that thing he has been!

city hall buildings, Thionville, France

Tuesday I was up early and took to the bus to Thionville, 30km away in France. Remembering that international postage from France was quite cheap and knowing that nothing (ciggarettes, alcohol and petrol excluded) can be described as cheap in Luxembourg, I looked into the price difference last year and found that I could post up to 7kg in a pre-paid box from France for 40euros, compared to paying 160euros to post 7kg from Luxembourg. So, before Christmas I lugged 14kg of presents and crap I wanted to ship home over the border on the bus, discovered the handrawn map I copied of Google was useless and wandered aimlessly around town until I found the Tourist Office, and then spent a whole hour in the shop sorting everything out with a english-speaking man who told me that his daughter had gone to New Zealand on exchange, and reported it to be 'boring, with nothing to do'.

Thionville, France

I looked around me at Thionville, a town of 40 000 with nothing special and no exciting nightlife or activities of its own, and had to wonder where in New Zealand she had been living. Thionville was so unexciting, I didn't even mention going there in this blog. This time however, the town was covered in snow, and even the most boring and basic of places look pretty under snow, so I walked around for a hour or so taking photos, until the cold really got to me and I jumped on the bus again. Back in Luxembourg, I walked from the train station into the city centre to photograph the Petrusse Valley in between.

Petrusse Valley, Luxembourg Ville, Luxembourg

Arriving back home, I noticed that some of our neighbours had shoveled the snow of their driveway and the pavement. With it being sunny during the day, but still so cold, it was really icy and Rogier had hit the rubbish bin sliding while backing out the night before, and because I've never shoveled snow before I thought it would be fun to give it a go. I thought wrong! Shoveling snow is hard work, that stuff is damn heavy and it took me forever to work out how to break up the ice, rather than just trying to scrape it off the concrete. I won't even tell you how long it took me, but I was pretty proud of my effort.

So, not a very interesting blog post I know, I'l do my best to get out and about a bit more in February!

Photos from January are here. I've also just gotten into Twitter in a big way, you can follow me here.

Back to Liege in October

Lena standing on the promenade above Liege

I first visited Lena in Liege, Belgium, back in February, and have since dropped by in June and again in July. Here in Luxembourg (and other catholic countries), Tuesday the first of November was a public holiday called All Saints Day (the day after Halloween, it's a day commemorating deceased who have reached heaven, so you go put flowers on graves), and as Jacquie was in the Netherlands for work the weeks before and after, Rogier decided to take Monday off and go up with the kids for a long weekend. So, I decided to hitch a ride with them as far as Liege in Belgium, and then train back to Luxembourg by myself on Monday night.

Liege in Autumn

The trip up was probably the best car ride I've had with the kids, we got organised really quickly in the morning and they were really well behaved. I got there at lunchtime, so we went to a new Pakistani place and had tandoori chicken chapati kebab things, and then whiled away the afternoon drinking tea and hanging out in the park.

View of the Foire from the Ferris wheel

Lena's mum is an awesome cook, so after we had a delicious dinner at home we went to the Foire d'Octobre, or the October Fair. It's a huge carnival that runs from the first weekend in October until 11 November, all spread out along the city's main boulevard, with rides, games, food boothes and stalls selling stuff like crafts and clothing. The one thing I noticed was the lack of ittle wooden sheds selling beer or wine like you get at fairs in Germany or Luxembourg.

Lacquement

We went on what felt like the ferris wheel of death, I'm sure its the tallest one I've ever been on, and the seats were like buckets hanging from one pole, so they could rock and spin around in circles, and there wasn't a cage or anything to hold you in. It scared me more than the bungy ball back at the Schueberfouer in Luxembourg, much to Lena's amusement. I had a huge waffle, dipped in white chocolate and covered in strawberries, cream and more chocolate, and also tried the Liege speciality 'Lacquemant', a wafer dipped in syrup, allegedly invented in 1903. I'm not really a fan, tastes like a war, dry biscuit dipped in maple syrup, the texture really doesn't do it for me.

We'd planned on going out, but as most students in Belgium return from their university city to their home towns and villages on the weekends, and even more so this week with the holiday, the place was pretty dead and we were both really tired, and after a few beers we decided to go home.

Market

On Sunday morning we went with Lena's mum to the weekly riverside market that I'd gone to in February. She brought a few odds and ends, flowers and bread, and I brought a childrens 'my first words' picture book in French! We brought some roasted chestnuts as I'd never tried them before. Apparently these ones weren't very good, but I don't think I'd like them anyway, they are pretty flavourless and have a weird texture too, kind of like a moist scone. We sat at a cafe for coffee, and then headed back for lunch.

Alleyway

That afternoon, Lena and I walked along the promenade of the les Coteaux de la Citadelle, a walk along a ridge in the north of the city, behind the Palace of the Princes in Place St-Lambert and close to Lena's place. We started by walking through some crazy alleyways, with heaps of stairs to go up. It's kind of like Wellington, people live off these tiny alleys with no road access to their houses. At the top of the ridge, we walked through trees until we came out at a spot with a couple of buildings, I think the Citadelle was one of them, and a promenade with a great view over Liege. It was quite an amazing walk.

Lena 'cooked' dinner for us (she's got quite a reputation for not being able to cook anything!), reheating her mum's boulettes a la liegeoise, and frying chips with my help, and then we sat around watching a movie.

me with the speculoos waffle and fries

On Monday we had a couple of beers at one of our favourite bars, and then went back to the Foire so that I could get Belgian fries and another waffle, this time dipped in white chocolate and covered with speculoos cookies, cream and melted speculoos spread. It was heaven, and I expect it's to blame for my pants not fitting so well after the weekend! And then I was off, the train ride home was kind of intense, I ended up on a non-direct train and had to wait around another city quite a bit, and they are doing roadworks near the Belgian-Luxembourgish border, so it took over three hours to get home to the empty dark house. A pretty relaxed weekend, but good to get away for a bit and to see part of Liege that I hadn't been to before.

More photos from this trip to Liege are here.

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.

The countdown begins, and a Uni party in Liege

The hallway. I am really over living like this!

I got back from Germany at about 3.30pm on Monday, started working as soon as I walked in the door, and didn't stop until I left for Liege on Friday morning! Koi and Jan had decided that the current phase of work on the house had to be finished this week, so after them sitting around for months while builders came in once a week they tried to finish it all off by working non-stop for a week themselves. So I had the kids non-stop for a week myself, and I think I will right up until the go to Thailand.

Alice has a newfound love of toilets

The original deal was for me to work a 35 hour week here with two days off. Even with my two days off I've been doing 45-50 hour weeks and I'll get paid for the extra time, but I am starting to feel a bit abused, they are putting a lot of pressure on me to look after both kids and do all of the cooking and cleaning. I realise this is what I'd be doing if they were my own kids anyway, and it's not really a big problem, I prefer  being left alone with the kids to organise things my own way, but I think its hard here because they have such high and specific expectations of me. Like, if it were my kids and house, then I could decide just to order pizza and let the dirty washing pile up for an extra day if I had a headache or if the baby was sick, but here I'm paid to just get stuff done. Also, they somehow expect me to be doing all of this and actively engaging with Arin one-on-one at the same time, like reading with him and playing outside etc. Which I love doing, but I only have one pair of hands and can only be in one place at once. Yesterday, a Belgian girl my age came to play with Arin, and Jan got all 'look at how happy he is playing outside with her, we expected you to do that'. I was too shocked to give him a witty reply about how I was inside cooking them dinner and dealing with the baby the whole time. I'm sure if she tried to cook dinner and juggle both kids, then Arin would have just been hanging out in the kitchen like he does with me most evenings. I think their unrealistic expectations have a lot to do with why they chew through nannies so fast, they really need to decide whether they want a one-on-one tutor for Arin, or someone to cook and clean and look after the baby, because achieving both at the same time are not possible, apart from the brief time that she naps.

Liege train station

I think that because we all know we've only got a week left to go, no one is being polite anymore. This last week, everything that has gone wrong here has been my fault. Which does kind of make sense, seeing as I am the one that does pretty much everything, but its really unfair. Like, blaming me for using the washing machine when there was a problem with the pipes. Seeing as I am the only one who using the washing machine, would it not make sense to tell me about that? I used it at 5am when I got up for the crying baby and she puked on me, her bed and the couch, I really don't appreciate being told of for doing washing when I was never told not to. Nor did I appreciate being yelled at today when the two of them left the house too late to pick up Arin and still make it to the doctor on time, when I had given them three hours warning that I wasn't happy taking the sick baby out into bad weather to pick him up myself. And on the subject of the sick baby, I am getting so stressed out by them not taking her to the doctor. She's been coughing and scratching her ears for a week now, and I keep telling them but they keep insisting that she's fine. She might be fine for the whole 20 minutes of each day that they see her, but she certainly isn't fine the other 23 hours and 40 minutes of each day.

So, I am definitely counting down now. I almost feel like I should do something about the situation here, but I'm a bit lost as to what I can do. They leave for Thailand next Tuesday, so I guess I only work Wednesday and Thursday this week and Sunday, Monday, then I'm done and off again traveling for the rest of the month.

Lena and I

I spent last weekend in Liege with Lena. I waited over half an hour for a bus to get to Antwerp, which then turned up so loaded that I couldn't get in the front door and took so long that I missed the train I had planned to take, and then I got all confused when I had to change stations because Liege is actually Luik in Flemish (this is annoying right? If it's a french-speaking city then it should have the more common french name on the sign, even in the flemish region!) but must have managed a connection that the website deemed impossibly fast because I still arrived in Liege at the time I had intended.

Part of the HEC party

We went to 'HEC Escape Garden Party'. HEC has something to do with their university, pretty much it was a huge party held by their student union or something, to celebrate the end of the school year. It was meant to be a summery garden affair, but it was raining and instead of gardens it was half on a uni driveway and half in the forest that surrounds Liege. It was a bit different from any organised university party that I went to in NZ - there was no toilets (everyone just peed in the trees) no rubbish bins so the ground got disgusting, and as we arrived they had Jim Beam there checking the ID's but only of people who volunteered them. So if you showed them your ID you got a free drink, if you didn't, then you just had to walk in and buy one. Totally illegal in NZ!

Celine, Valeriane and Lena

Anyway, we spend the the afternoon drinking and running around in the rain meeting different people. A vodka-filled watermelon and Lena's sister made notable appearances, and Lena did a good job of scheming free drinks out of the bartenders. We had to wait aggeeees everytime we wanted food or drinks - we once waited like 15 minutes for an expensive sausage that Lena took one bite out of and then dropped on the ground. Quite a good party though, they had a DJ with a good crowd going and Lena's friends are really cool, although I found it really weird to look around and see only all-girl or all-guy groups standing around talking, here it's definitely less common to have friends of different sexes.

The Square

Then it was back into the city, with a brief stop at her place before we headed into town. Liege is famous for its bars, they are all centered in this area of old cobbled alleys called The Square, I went there a lot last time I was there, its fun but really gross. Unfortunately, the almost twelve hours straight of drinking caught up with us and we headed back to bed around 1am.

Garlic (The french dude is smoking an awesome pipe)

We headed out around lunch time the next day, and visited a weird international market that was taking place in the centre. The stalls were mostly dedicated to food, whole tables piled with huge cheeses or saucisson or garlic, and I ate some good polish barbeque for lunch. We had coffee and then went to a movie, Get Low, which was actually quite an event for me because I hadn't been to see a movie in over a year and a half (and that time was with Lena too funnily enough!). Then her mum cooked some awesome duck for dinner and I was off back to the train station. Liege is only a couple of hours away by train, but I got stuck outside the Antwerp train station. Normally, no matter what time I arrive back here by train, I miss the bus by a few minutes. This time I was at the bus stop three minutes early - and then the bus was 23 minutes late! I think they've been on strike or something, normally the buses are pretty good but I had two bad runs in two days. It was a great weekend, I came back to Antwerp feeling a lot better, I think I just needed the reminder that I have friends in this country, it was good to hang out and not feel so isolated, and as things get crazier here, its good to actually get out of the house during my time off.

my packing. so far unsuccessfully!

But, the weekend left me feeling quite tired and now I'm sick, everyone is sick but of course I am still the one who gets up for Alice all the time. Last week, I had managed to run every day even when kids woke me up in the middle of the night or early in the morning, I was quite impressed with myself, but being sick has thrown a spanner in the works the last couple of days and I really hope that I wake up healthy tomorrow. It's also been really really hot the last couple of days, highs of 35 even when it's pouring. I'm  trying to pack, not easy when I'm working thirteen hour days and then collapse into bed sick at the end of them. So far, I haven't gotten much further than walking around my room aimlessly wondering how my stuff all managed to multiply while in my closet the last three months. I'm going to take a suitcase or two to Luxembourg next week, but I am really not looking forward to returning to the nomadic thing with such a huge backpack again. Plans for the next month are starting to take shape, I'm staying in Belgium a little bit longer to visit Gent and Liege again, and go to a festival with Lena, and then I'm off to Gottingen again, Dusseldorf, Hannover, hopefully Nuremberg to see a (non-AFS!) kiwi friend, Italy for a week, and Mainz where I hope to prove once and for all that I can eat the spiciest currywurst! Then Luxembourg at the end of July.


One week to go....


Photos of the weekend in Liege are here.

Liège, Lena and a day trip to the Netherlands

Lena's house

Lena is a former exchange student, she lived in Wellington mid 2009-mid 2010. Her city Liège is kind of near the border with Germany. I love her house, its in the centre of the city and is three stories tall but narrow, I find it really crazy compared to our bungalows in NZ. The buildings here are mostly brick or plaster, and grey or brown, I like it because its different but really I guess its a bit dreary. The people here are more of a melting pot than those in places like Mainz were, there is a lot more migration from places like Africa, I guess because its French-speaking, this neighbourhood particularly reminds me of Newtown back home in Wellington. Lena's mum speaks quite good english, her dad not so much but as a former actor he was pretty good at conveying things without words. He is always joking around but with so little english it was really hard for me to tell what was meant to be a joke and what wasn't!

Friday night we had a traditional dish from Liège, giant meatballs with fries, and just relaxed catching up and watched a movie. Saturday morning I woke up to possibly the best discovery of my trip so far; Speculoos. Speculoos are a kind of biscuit traditionally made for St Nicholas Eve in early December, but now eaten all year, they are pretty good (remember me talking about the Lotus biscuits me and Hauke had in Austria, they were Speculoos actually, Lotus is a brand) but a million times better is Speculoos spread that you put on bread. I can't even describe it, its more amazing than anything I've ever tasted, its maybe like a caramel KitKat chunky on bread. Awesome. After breakfast we walked around the city to explore, with Lena showing me all of her favourite places and bars. The bars here are all centered around a few narrow pedestrian only alleyways that Lena calls The Square, its apparently very famous (a lot of exchange students here in Belgium say they came here because they heard about the square). I had a few Belgian beers, one tasted like banana that was quite weird. We popped our heads inside the Cathedral here but its the outside that amazed me, its filthy! You can really see the effect of pollution on the buildings here, old ones have a layer of thick black except where grafitti has been removed. The whole city is quite dirty actually, the streets as well, as people just throw their rubbish on the ground. That night Lena's parents left us the house so that Lena could throw a party for her friends to meet me and to celebrate the end of their exams, except that most of her friends don't really speak english, or at least they were too shy to do so in front of so many people. Another former exchange student, Adrien came, cool to see a familiar face!

part of the market

We woke up pretty late on Sunday and then rushed around because Lena's mum reminded us that the market was on, its over a mile long stretched out along the bank of the Meuse River and is the oldest market in Europe. I am getting much better now at not spending money, so we mostly looked at all of the different types of food and weird things like heaps of birds in cages. I did get a kind of cape thing for 3euro. We visited a museum that her mum was really passionate about me seeing, but we were really too hungover for it and just strolled through getting lost and making jokes about things. They had a pretty cool exhibition of glasswork, it made me really want to start collecting glass artefacts but I've already learnt that glass and travelling don't go well together. We walked around some more, to see part of Lena's university (heaps prettier than Hauke's in Mainz!) and the statue of Tchantchesis, according to folklore a puppet that appeared from a crack in the ground in 760 and only would drink Pékèt, a kind of gin. Kind of random. Lena is a funny tour guide, she really knows nothing about this city!

Monday I had to fly back to Madrid to go to my appointment with the Foreigners Office, so we just had a picnic lunch in the botanic gardens and then I jumped on a train, we were running late so Lena didn't get a chance to explain to me where the hell I was going or how to use my ten-trip ticket. The trains here are really cheap, as I'm under 26 I got ten trips within a year for 50euros, so that works out as 10 NZ dollars per trip of any distance, much cheaper than any other country I am visiting. I flew out of another middle-of-no-where airport with Ryanair. I really have a love-hate relationship with that airline, I love paying 20 dollars for an international flight, but I hate flying with a company thats so useless! We had to wait for ages on a staircase between going through the gate and getting on the plane here, and this Spanish lady in front of me was geting so worked up, pacing back and forwards and sighing loudly, she got me really annoyed and I wanted to tell her to either deal with the long waits or stop flying with Ryanair. She also skipped in front of me in the line, Spanish people are so huge on that, but I got her back by beating her onto the plane anyway - you don't have seats allocated on Ryanair and often they overbook the planes and refuse passage to some people, so its like a race to get onboard.


Anne-Marie and me


Madrid was hot! It was 18° when I landed at 10pm, and the Metro underground is even hotter. Its only the beginning of February and I found it too hot, I can't imagine what summer will be like. Anne-Marie, girl who went to Costa Rica with me was in town on holiday, and I hadn't seen her for five years so I picked her up, dropped my stuff off and we went out in search of a beer. In fairness to Madrid it was a Monday but we seemed to spend quite a lot of time walking around looking for an open bar for a city of that size and reputation! Its funny how you can go five years without seeing someone but still hang out like nothing changed, and its good talking to someone who has kinda gone through the same stuff as you, like what we experienced returning to NZ after doing an exchange. As I am staying with families in most of the countries I am visiting, it often feels like being an exchange student, trying to fit in when not knowing the culture, language or that family's particular way of doing things. Anne-Marie called it 'The State of Confusion', when you have no idea whats going on but you stop stressing about it, like you don't know where you're going or what you are going to do when you get there, but you get in the car along with everybody else anyway. I am getting really good at just smiling all the time and coping what other people do!

Lena, me and Adrien on Saturday

For all it was a Monday night, I had sworn never to drink before travelling, and I had to both deal with the Foreigners Office and catch an international flight the next day, I ended up back at home at 6am and was not impressed with myself when Miguel woke me up at 8am to go to my appointment. This started off badly, the lady at the last office made it for me but didn't give me the reference number so the security guard wouldn't let me in the door without a fight. This time I only waited for half a hour, but again the lady insisted she couldn't do anything for me and suggested I go back to the last one or try the police. Despite a fierce hangover that made me want to do nothing except curl up in a ball I kept fighting her and eventually got to go upstairs to see her boss, who said that after I had been at the other office the last time, they had decided that that same office actually would give us ID cards, she showed me an internal memo about this from last Friday. Trip to Madrid for nothing! The NZ Embassy keep emailing me to see what's happening, but I might leave it for now until I'm back in March, I don't feel like wasting any more money going to Madrid and I doubt that they have a template for the ID cards ready yet! Oh Spain...

Liège

Then it was back to the airport, a nap for a couple of hours in the air, then a couple more hours on a train back to Liège before Lena was rushing me out the door again to go out. We headed back to The Square, and ran from one bar to another ripping out coupons from flyers given to the uni students for drink specials. Bars here are gross, they floors are sticky and covered in ciggarette butts, and I can't work out where all of the toilet seats disappear too. I really have to explain here about drinking in Belgium, I think NZ's reputation for a bad drinking culture is un-deserved when you look at this country. The legal age for drinking is 16, but many young people start going to bars at about 14. At University, they have a crazy system, similar to fraternities but insead of being people who live together it is based on what faculty you study in. The students undergo around 2 or 3 months of torturous initiation activities, things like eating catfood and live goldfish and staying for a hour in the cold on your knees with your hands in the air singing songs, and excessive amounts of drinking. Every fraternity has a competition to see who can skull the most beers in five minutes, and then all the fraternities compete against each other, some guys get up in the 50s so thats about a beer every five seconds right? They just puke and then keep drinking. At parties, they skull beer as a way of saying hello to people they bump into. To me it all seems sick, so either I am getting too old for that kind of thing, or young Belgians really are crazier than young NZers.

Apart from watching all of this crazy drinking around me, the night was pretty standard, until I saw a guy wearing a hoodie with a NZ flag on it! He had spent a year on exchange in Hamilton and was as surprized to meet a kiwi in Liège as I was to see a NZ flag. He was quite cool, I spent a lot of the night talking to him and his friends. For us Wednesday only begun around lunch-time and was pretty quiet. We visited some friends of Lena, and then spent the evening hanging around the house and watching a movie.

Maastricht

On Thursday we went to the Netherlands. It took us 30 minutes by train to reach the city of Maastricht, it really is an unreal feeling to jump out of the train after such a short amount of time and suddenly everything is in another language! That was quite funny actually, after my three weeks in German speaking countries I could understand Dutch better than Lena could! After yet another amazing kebab we wandered into the city and had a look around. The first thing you notice is the bikes, everyone was biking everywhere, and no one wears a helmet which still seems strange to me. It was much cleaner than Liège as well, and there are a lot of english speakers around who attend university there.

Red, yellow and green decorations on everything

We checked out the market place, the town square and some churches. Everything was covered in red, yellow and green decorations, the first couple of times I wondered what that was for Lena reckoned it was just because they are the Rastafari colours and the Netherlands is quite into pot, but even places like optometrists had these decorations, so I reckon they were from a festival or something. I brought my obligatory wooden clogs, tried Dutch beer, and then we took a train back in time for Lena to go to work.





Maastricht


Friday I accompanied Lena to one of her psychology lectures, her university is outside of Liège surrounded by woods, quite strange, but the buildings were similar to those in NZ, more like Canterbury Uni than Wellington in that its more spread out. The only real difference between uni in NZ and here that I noticed was that people here talk throughout the entire lecture, I couldn't believe it, just chatting to their friends. In NZ the lecturer would have stopped the lecture and refused to talk over so many other voices. After eating possibly the worlds largest 'small size' sandwidges we rushed back home so I could pack before meeting Daniel, the colombian AFS student that Lena is looking after at a Latino bar. It was cool to meet him and to see Lena having the same kind of conversation with him that I used to have with her back in New Zealand. We were running really late when we flew back to the house to get my stuff and head back to the train station, and Lena's mum kept insisting there was no way I would catch my train to Brussels, but I arrived only two minutes late and the train was still at the platform. Now off to Brussels to visit Arthur!