Beautiful Belgium

For the Easter weekend this year we travelled to Belgium; Greg's Dad and his girlfriend (Dad's, not Greg's!) were visiting, so the four of us piled into a rental car and headed out.

The first adventure was actually renting the car. Greg had booked online, and so we assumed the pick up would be a breeze....blithely forgetting all about French bureaucracy! To get the car we needed drivers liscences, of course; we also needed our carte de sejour (residency) cards. As the address on the carte de sejour ws not our residence address the clerk wanted a bill or similar with our address on it. As we didn't have this with us, we needed to also show our passports. If we had a firstborn, no doubt they would've wanted that too! Finally (with a line up growing behind us) the clerk agreed to give us the car, warning that it was "tres exceptionelle".

Then the adventure of driving in Paris began! We found that it is definately a two person job, one to watch the GPS and figure out which crooked little road it wants you to take, and the other to keep a 360 degree look out for cars, bikes, scooters and pedestrians!

However, once out of Paris, the drive became idyllic with vistas of rolling green hills and tiny villages. We stoped for lunch (coq au vin, yum!) and then at the Vimy Ridge Memorial.

Vimy Ridge was all we had hoped it would be. At the same time imposing and serene, it lays like an exclamation point on the windswept lanscape. It is incredibly moving. The faces of the allegorical figures manage to conjure greif and hope together, perfectly capturing the spirit of the nation at the end of the Great War. The guides, young students from Canada, were friendly and knowledgeable. We also took a tour of the tunnel system, a true feat of engineering. Greg found the pocked lanscape particularly evocative, left as it was after the war to grow over.

The weather turned chilly and wet, so we returned to the car and on to Belgium. On the advice of a Belge co-worker of Greg's we went to Ghent which is considered a more authentic village then the picture perfect Bruges (but there is quite a rivalry between the two). We settled in at our eclectic B&B, run by a lovely Belge couple who are a jewellry designer and gallery owner respectively, and then struck out to explore. During the Middle Ages, Ghent was one of the largest cities in Europe due to the importance of the cloth trade. Today, the town remains accesible by foot, and we enjoyed the ancient Medieval buildings (built in the unique Flemish style) and canal like river systems. There is an unmistakable air of creativity about the place, with lots of funky shops, galleries and artisans studios to see. We also ate very well, with Meg trying the local speciality of waterzooi. Sadly, Greg had the stomach flu, so was unable to properly appreciate the many beers Belgium is famous for.

The next day we attended Mass (in Belge) at the beautiful St. Baavo cathedral, and travelled on to Bruges. We found it to also be very pretty, if a little more 'done up' than Ghent. Meg and Heather took a canal tour by boat, but had some difficulty understanding the guide who spoke Belge, German, French and English all with a song-songy drawl! We took a few moments to look in on the statue of the Virgin and Child by Michaelangelo at St. Michelskirch, then headed home.