Chocolate and Beer

For the late May Bank Holiday, despite poor planning on my part, I managed to join two of my American friends on a trip to Belgium. We stayed in Brussels and spent a day in Bruges over the 3 day weekend. Unfortunatly I don't know a lot about European history (which has been bothering me more and more since I moved here...I need to start reading some non-fiction) so I had no idea what to expect from Brussels...except of course for Chocolate and Beer (and waffles).
They were having a Jazz festival in the Grand Place, I don't know who was playing, but it gave the whole area a really great energy and I love this picture of the incredibly modern stage set in front of the incredibly Gothic buildings in the square.

Bruges was not a city I was familiar with until a few months ago...but the Brits love it. It's a very small town near the coast of Belgium with loads of canals. Hundreds of years ago the Bruges Harbour apparently rivaled London's. Now it's very quiet, and sort of sleepy when it's not being over-run by tourists...which it usually is. This is a picture from the little cruise we took along the canal. No Gondolas here, so it's not quite like Venice.

We also visited a pub that had 400 different types of Belgian Beer. Between us we tried about 12...two were absolutely foul, and I will forever steer clear of the 'fruit' ones. The first of the foul ones was served in a wine bottle...weird.















The menu listed all 400 beers by type color-coded and indexed along with a description of each, so naturally, the menu was huge.

Flat Stanley goes to Paris

My friend Andromeda, and the rest of her 2nd grade class sent Flat Stanley to me as part of a writing assignment and as luck would have it, he arrived the night before I left for Paris!

It was my third time to Paris, but my travel buddy had never been before, so we saw all the major sites, including the Eiffel Tower, The Louvre, Notre Dame, and Sacre Coeur.



We also saw an over-the-top show at the Moulin Rouge, but Stanley was too young for that.

Goettingen, Germany

I was there for work, and with all the surrounding travel (and BA's effcient loss of my luggage) I didn't manage to engineer a weekend there, though I'd love to go back. Goettingen is a small, old college town that is pretty much in the center of Germany. I was there 3 days and 2 nights, and did manage to have some really good food, beer, and morning walks mixed in with all the work I was doing.

This is a picture of the town square that I took one morning at about 6am, when the bakeries were in full swing and the rest of the town was just waking up.




I don't know much about this statue, but it's lovely, and most of the postcards of the town sported an image of it decorated with fresh flowers.

Uneventful trips to the US

I have no good pictures of the trips I took to the US, and as they were all locations I have been to (or lived in) on a number of occassions, were are going to take artistic license and skip them. Except for a brief nod to my friend Andromeda, whose 8th birthday party I actually made it to before heading to Germany.

Even this is not a good picture. Usually I love my camera, but I can't adjust the shudder speed and children move too fast to be captured without fuzzy edges.



She made out like a bandit though...the sheer number of balloons alone. Luckily her dad has a van.

Two months and no posting

What can I say...anyone who used to check this blog has probably stopped by now, because I never put anything new here. But since I have a link to this on my CouchSurfing profile, I should probably be a little better about updating it. It's not as though I haven't been traveling or doing post worthy things...I'm just not a natural blogger. But I have two months worth of travel and hijinks to post about, and in the words of the Mad-Hatter, "Start at the beginning, go until you get to the end, and then, stop."

In those two months I have, visited Goettingen, Paris, Brussels, Bruges, and the US (twice). Best to divide the posts by topic I suppose.