The travels: part 8 Beautiful Belgium

 Belgium! We got in around 10:30.. 2 hours earlier than planned. However we had no way to contact our friend Armandine to let her know. We waited at the train station till she got there around midnight. She was nice enough to let us stay at her place for a week. We were happy to relax for awhile and be in the same place for more than a few hours! Armandine lives in a city called Gembloux. Its very small!

These were our morning snacks! They make the prettiest little desserts in Belgium and France. Up to this point I had always been to scared to try them because I didn't know what to do with them (how to eat them) once I acquired one! Good thing for Armandine. :) Incase anyone is wondering.. we ate these with spoons.

Armandine took us to a city called Namur. This is where she went to school when she was younger. There are lots of young people there! We got lunch, and then went for dessert. More pretty desserts! After dessert, Armandine had to go study. She said we should go walk up a big hill so we wouldn't be bored at her apartment all day. haha. We climbed this big hill and here's what we saw...

A tower.... Which overlooks some tennis courts

A city building or something..

Im not sure what this was. some ampitheatre maybe?

Lizards. This is my debut into wildlife photography. :P

The flags. The French speaking part/ Southern part of Belgium is Wallonia. Each region of Belgium is fiercely proud of itself... Last I heard Belgium still didn't have a government!

Downtown Namur.
Then we headed back to Armandines. We had a couple lazy days. We watched a lot of movies and got teased a lot for being lazy. One day when Armanding was off studying we finally got out of the apartment to see the town. Here are our highlights from Gembloux..

A city building

Some old stairs behind the city building

The back of the city building

More pretty desserts!
So... that's it for Gembloux. I guess I didnt get a picture of the university Armandine was attending. I went to class with her one day. The class room was awesome. Very high tech and almost set up like a little theater. Way cooler than my French classroom!

The next adventure Armandine lead us on was to the North Sea. This is up in the Dutch speaking region of Belgium. Their train conductors were not very nice. But the area was pretty. We walked along the sea and went to a bird refuge.
I recommend listening to this awesome song while you read about our trip to the sea!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAOMop30Hro

Here's the Zwin Bird Refuge. They have a lot of cranes.

This fellow was waiting to greet us as we got off the bus.

This was a popular nesting place

Check out the bird at the bottom who made it into the picture. haha

Sleeping Swan

This was the place to socialize. It was pretty intense when all of these birds decided to fly away at the same time!

WHO?

You can't tell from this picture but this owl was sleeping on the ground. He did not seem pleased

(singing)....One of these things is not like the other...

This one was probably my favorite. He had nice hair.

                                                                   This is his wife.

This was an interestingly shaped one

Armanding playing with her nice new camera!

This was the big open area nearest the sea. Not many birds here, but a nice walk anyway.

And suddenly in the water... things started appearing.
Jellyfish!! at the bird refuge! We were all pretty fascinated by them. There were hundreds floating in with the tide.

There were big wooden hideouts where you could secretly look at the birds through little slots like this one.

And off in the distance was the bird refuge bunny statue.    .....Random....
Then we went back to the sea! We walked from one town to another to catch the train back to Gembloux

more jellyfish!

and toes..

The city we walked to is where Armanding would spend time each summer. Kind of like what Carlsbad, Ca is to my family.

The mini golf course

And those are our best pictures from Belgium. The time had come to leave. We had planned to get the most out of our train pass by going up to see the tulip fields in the Netherlands "on our way" home. It was actually about 2-3 hours out of our way, but it seemed worth it. We left Gembloux at about 5 am and took the train to Leiden, Netherlands. We got there around 8:30 am. We found the bus to the Keukenhoff Gardens and asked the lady if it was that same bus that would take us to the fields. "Oh!" she said, "We cut those down two weeks ago!" Really? I asked... so they're all gone? "Yes," she replied,  "You really missed a beautiful thing!"             Ouch.               Thanks bus lady. To get into Keukenhoff would have been $60 at with our trains schedule home we would have had less than an hour to see the gardens. Not worth it. So we hopped on a train to head home. This is how we felt about our experience in the Netherlands.

(...there were a lot of bikes behind us...)
We stopped in Antwerpen for a change over.

Even the train station was fancy!

Kennan liked the China Town gates right outside the train station

We had time and hunger so we bought some a Belgian waffle from a street vendor. And then we bought some Mcdonalds.

One thing I forgot to mention is that trains in Belguim are always late. Always. Unfortunately for us, we didn't plan this into our train schedule. We missed our train in Lille and had to spend an extra two hours at the train station and then buy new reservations to get home. Lame. But oh how we were happy to be back in France! Traveling is fun, but it felt so good to be back "home" where I knew the language (even if they have a slightly different accent in Lille... they say s'il vous plait too much.. its confusing. haha) and the best grocery stores to shop in! We ended up getting back into Angers around 10pm. And it felt good to finally be home.

Thus concludes our big long trip!