August 3, 2011 Brussels
August 3, 2011
the garden
the kitchen
We made it to Brussels on Sunday. Thanks Antoine for driving stupid distances on our behalf! 8 hours here and then he had to drive another 6 hours back to Orleans! Our place here is FABULOUS! Our hosts, Jerome and Thilde own this place and they bought into with two other friends that bought the huge ex-factory house behind and the house next door respectively. It’s really nice. There’s three floors and our room is on the first one (the ground floor, where Stef’s room and a common bathroom is the zero floor). Up on the next floor there’s a common kitchen, den and living room. It’s really cozy and relaxing and it’s gonna be a gas being here for 3 weeks with nothing to do. Right now Stef’s in Germany and Justin’s in France so Lisa and I are here with one other boarder and the owners, who are going on a vacation for the weekend, so lisa and i will have the place pretty much to ourselves. They both work with Doctors Without Borders which is how we found this place. Our friends Dorie and Philip hooked it up because they know Jerome and Thilde through Philip’s work with Greenpeace. The neighborhood is heavily ethnically muslim. I’ve heard about 10 different languages and the goods in the stores are written in Polish, Russian, a bunch of Balkanish stuff, etc. Right now it’s Ramadan so the place is a ghost town at night. Anyway, the sun was out and it was summer the day we got here, but since then it’s been overcast and raining off and on. Today we walked down to the Jardin Botanique which is where we usually play when we play Brussels. It’s about a 20 minute walk each way and tonight we discovered it goes right through the red light district! Blocks and blocks of nearly naked women standing in windows facing the street. It’s awesome.