Today we traveled down from Brussels. I must say, I really really enjoyed my day in Belgium. We went to Tournai, Ghent, Brussels and Namur. The food was really good (mmm Moules and Waterzooi), the place we stayed in nice - a beautiful loft apartment owned by an Artist and her husband - she decorated everything and hung her paintings in the apartment, the people could speak fairly fluent English and there were all sorts of lovely perfumes and chocolates (both of which my mother and I purchased a few). Transport was convenient too, with a metro going right into town.
Namur today was pretty dead. As we drove into town, we ran into a film crew with a guy all decked up in a suit and bowler hat, clutching three lovely lime green juggling pins. He stopped in the middle of the bridge leading to the main town square and the crew would film him as he juggled. When we left almost 2 hours later, he was still filming, and it was cold out :/
Namur has a nice old citadel, but it was a bit of a disaster. It's a Monday, and hence a lot of attractions, the citadel namely, were closed. We ended up walking about the ruins looking at things and I wandered off, through a tunnel and found myself on a wooden bridge over a very high gorge/moat ): I ended up standing in the middle, where the highest point of a cottage lay underneath, thinking that if the bridge collapsed at least I would fall the shortest distance. I stood there, stuck, for a few minutes because I could see through the gaps of the wood and got scared. It was all very silly really.
I learned today I am scared of tunnels (because they might collapse on me and kill me) and that I am afraid of bridge (because they might collapse under me and kill me). I already know I am afraid of the darkness (I always sleep with a light on if I am alone and in a new place), afraid of dark woody old rooms with dolls in them (like tonight and the first night where we stayed in a 300 year old Chateau B&B) and afraid of thinking about my future when I am 40 years old and potentially possessing 2 bratty children I want to kill, a husband who is cheating on me/and totally disinterested in bed, a mediocre dead end job and holding on to lots of shattered dreams. I am scared of a lot of things.
Anyway after I managed to unstick myself and shuffle back to the tunnel, where I kept trying to push thoughts of all those horrific Malaysian North-South highway landslides on the way to Ipoh and people go BURIED ALIVE, I emerged to find my parents exiting a nice perfumerie. Yesterday we all bought 3 vials of perfume from this nice charming Belgian guy in the market near the Brussel's Grand Plaza (between that and the Central Station on the metro line), and mine smelt like nice floral-ey apples. Today I ended up getting another bottle of perfume that reminds me a little of the Issey Miyake smell, something confirmed by the perfumer himself. Its a bit of a wonder how I'm going to use it, since I usually run out of my dorm to anything - late, and thus forget to spray even my Cacharel's Scarlett perfume on. All I know is I smelt so many perfumes that past 24 hours that my sense of smell has official imploded.
Lunch was a random Pizza Hut affair on the way to Luxembourg, since we had no choice. Before we entered a nice lady gave us a coupon for 0,30 euros off any drink. There were lots of random British kids running about the place, on a school trip of sorts.
Luxembourg was a disappointment. Not much really in the way of shopping, culture, or places of interest. Oh well.
On the way to our nice B&B in a little place called Charency-Vezin, we ended up crossing the Belgian-French border 5 times because we got lost. Boo. My dad is seriously so cheap. He refuses to pay for a damn GPS system so instead it's all map reading (for me) and we end up getting lost because the road and direction signs are not labelled clearly. This means in total we ended up crossing the Belgian-Luxembourg-French borders more than 7 times today. Imagine, if it was still the days before EU and every border crossing meant going through immigration customs...
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