Welcoming 2008, goodbye to Victor

Victors visit to Belgium and myself continued with an evening trip to Bruges, where we could meet up with Ellen for dinner. I had had a working day that day, but I have to say that this was a good way to regenerate. :) There wasn't that much time but we enjoyed a very nice dinner and beers as well as a photoshoot in the street and a run to the station in order to not loose our last train of the day back to Antwerp.... :P

It's not my favourite, but Victor wanted to see Brussels so I succumbed and experienced my nearly first ever sunny day in our capital. ;P Seriously, it attracts bad weather when I am there. ;) We did no museums, but instead walked around to look at nice architecture and the main sights and had, obviously, a nice warm sugar waffle. :B At the end of the day we considered going into the Atomium but both the price and the rumors about it put us off. People I know told me the view isn't even that great and inside the balls there is nothing to see and you don't even get the idea that you are in a ball...

Cathedral, Art Nouveau style house and Atomium with us in front

Last important stop was Bruges, this time for a full day rather than just the evening. Antwerp had rain, but we found the sun together with a million or so other tourists... The centre was packed, but still as pretty as ever. In the afternoon Ellen had some time to join us on the visit and to flee from the crowds, we headed for a quite walk just outside the city centre next to the windmills and waterside.

New Years eve was celebrated with a greeeeeat dinner in an Indonesian restaurant (she-male included :P) followed by fireworks on the river that runs though Antwerp. The next day we had another small party at home, let's call it a chocolate party. ;o) The picture says it all I think. :)

Yum! Yum?? Yum!!!

All good things came to an end however and after two weeks Victor had to change Belgium once more for Finland. It's a lot closer by than Venezuela anyway, so I am sure it wil take less time than the 2, 5 years which separated us before these trips. ^^ Och Thor min, du är mer än välkomna när som hälst du vill eh!!

Back to Belgium, but not alone

Flying home was not the best part of the trip, as we were both super tired and the darkness outside didn't bring us much distraction either. Breakfast in Copenhagen (Cho-bam!) was good though expensive, the views of the people around us were nice and whilst flying over Belgium, I finally saw my first real snow of that winter... Quite ironic yes, but there was not that much of it so we didn't miss too much. ;P

The first day was mainly spent by catching up on some sleep and dinner party in the night with a bunch of my colleagues at a tapas restaurant. Not a true representation of Belgium for a start I guess, but enjoyable nonetheless. ;) Next a two day visit to my hometown Antwerp was scheduled. The weather was amazingly nice and therefore we could cycle all the time and thus avoid all the crammed trams and busses due to last minute Christmas-shoppers. Cycling in between all of those people turned out to be quite hard too though. ;o) We saw the main pretty areas of downtown as well as my favourite cafe where my guests are forced to try the raspberry cake to which I am addicted... In this case I got the feeling the taste of it was mutually highly appreciated. ^^

Dreaming of presents... and cake...

The world famous belgian fries were obviously also on the menu, but we gave the visit a more scandinavian touch on Christmas day by building our very own "Pepperkakshus"! (aka ginger bread house) Looking at the result we were rightfully proud of it. :)

Tatatataaaa!

Christmas eve was the night for a good dinner and presents of course. With a new member of the family there were more presents than ever and that is something the child in me absolutely adored. ^^ One of my favourite gifts was my Marimekko bag and the most painfull has already proven to be my epilator...it does it's job though.

The next city I wanted to show Victor was Ghent. I think it became his favourite too, it was a sunny day and it all looked so nice outside. The visit there ended in a bit of an awkward way though due to going to the S.M.A.K., the museum for contemporary art. Usually he loves this kind of museums, in this case however we were slightly revolted, shocked and quite dissapointed 5 minutes into the visit. :P The exhibition showed the works of Paul McCarthy (no, not the Beatle) and as I try to keep this blog reasonably pretty, I will just give a link and then people can judge by themselves if we are just wussies or if the stuff truly is as ****ed up as we thought. ;) Read about his type of work here and a trailer of the stuff we saw here. I'm sure some people see the art in this, it's just nothing our eyes and stomachs could appreciate. We headed straight over for some cake to relax our minds and then back home to play with Anakin and Amidala on my Wii Star Wars Lego game. :P