a weekend trip to Belgium

I won’t bore everyone with our normal weekdays, suffice it to say

that John goes to class, we shop, eat, do usual things and sleep at night.  Even in a great little Dutch town, those things don’t change, but on Thursday, I went over to Hesther’s to celebrate her birthday with some of her lady friends.  They were from all over the world and of course, every one of 

 these elegant ladies spoke English, but yours truly couldn’t speak anything else.  I’m starting to get annoyed by the fact that I can’t speak another language, most everyone here speaks 3 at least.  But they also get to practice, I don’t know who I’d practice with at home to get

  better using my French.  After this lovely visit, I came home to find John home and getting lunch ready.  How easy is a trip to Belgium from the Netherlands without a car?  John and I finished lunch and left David and Margaret’s house at 1pm.  We were on the 1:16 train out of Middelburg to Vlissingen, walked 20 meters to the ferry and were on the 1:33pm ferry out of Vlissingen to Breskins.  In Breskins, we had a little wait for the bus that comes only every hour, but 

 were on a our way to Bruges within 30 minutes.  This entire trip cost 10 euro each and we crossed a border in there.  Arrived in Bruges at 4pm with John a little motion sick from the bus which was very herky –jerky, but once we were on solid ground again, he was 

better.  We were going to try to make it to the church of the Holy Blood before it closed for the day and were able to wander Bruges in the general direction of our hotel at the same time. 

We got  to the church of the Holy Blood and the blood was  locked up in the silver chalice, so we’re coming back tomorrow to see it because it is on display on Fridays.  

Everything that we need to see is now closed, but standing around the city square even with it full of market stalls is pretty impressive.  We checked in to the hotel and were pretty pleased with the location and our room that had two floors and was the “studio” at the back of the hotel next to the courtyard.  We headed out to find John some Belgian beer and

catch some of the World Cup games.  We found the US game with a  whole bunch of ex-pat Americans watching and had a long chat with a man from Indiana that had married a Belgian woman and moved here.  This was a nice chat and we moved on to go see some 

things and walk around before heading to the main park in town where they were going to show the Belgium match with about 12,000 people in attendance.  The park was full of people, but we were able to sit to the side and watch the comings and goings of all these drunk people in red, yellow and black acting ridiculous.  When halftime came and there was still no score, it was dark and we were tired, we left to go get some sleep.  I’m not a fan of soccer, but I’ve watched enough games now to know that this was an exceptionally boring game where neither team was really trying.