Message

Sunny Boy, 24 June 2009
Luxembourg, The true land of Castlevania!

The Bulge

Hello People!

I hope facebook has been treating you all good in delivering all sorts of nicaraguan gifts for your birthdays, exotic dates to bury your loneliness and your friends are uploading pictures of the drunked side of your punk attitude!

I m back into travelling since... doh 3 weeks (when I dumped my company, remember ?) and simply busy discovering some place I d never think I d had to take some time to discover myself : my own country... and its neighbours... That's right, believe it or not there's quite a couple of things to see (bars, pubs), taste (beers, pints), do (clubbing, dancing), enjoy (pints, beers) in mi own country! And it aint all about booze!

Left mi hometown (Dinant, that is, some sort of a mixture between a theme park in the summer days - and a goulag in the frosty winter days) last week after loading the stationwagon with 2 bikes, a tent, food for thought and veggie meals and headed strait to Beerland : Chimay... Truly a natural wonder, this beer! It s been monked in by the local clergy since prehistoric days (and still is!) and every sip from it reminds you of what liquid gold must taste like in your o-so-macdonnaldy pallet...

Next came a difficult (it was!) ascension of some darn foresaken hill looming above the french side (hilly that is) of the Meuse (not "die Meuze" of course, but just the Maas...) by bike in Revin, France ; we were raving at the top of this one!

Had a salad (or was it a veggie-burger ?) in the woods scaling above the Meuse (I actually wonder if the French know that this piece of land belongs to them, the land being so free of indigenes... - or maybe they think its part of Belgium!!)

Rolled over Frahan on the Semois river (and blew a shoe or two on the way to Godefroi d'Bouillon's rock-nested humid-inspired fortress) in the middle of the Belgian Ardennes before taking out (after a halt in Bastogne - nah, nothing much for us,... dont understand why the fritz spent so much time here though... ) a series of enchanted castles : from Clervaux (and the singing monks) in the north of Luxemburg (pronounced Lew-kzem-bwerg) to magic-and-disney-chantilly Vianden in the east. Along the way we also saw a couple of lakes (Esch-sur-Sure) and a half dozen (esch-sur-sure, Beaufort, Bourscheid, Larochette, errr...) other fortresses - not to mention the local greeny canyons and their bridges (if you're looking for the schiessentümpel... beware!! You might be on it - or maybe it's hiding behind a tree) ... The people here seem to be going mad for fortresses and bridges I like them too, those fortresses...

I Like Lew-kzem-bwerg too actually : everything looks so small and so close and so... LEGO!

So anyways, debating wether I should challenge myself to visit Flanders next week (for those who don't know : that's a difficult task for a Walloon)... Nah, it's OK, they still got beer up there...

And women...

And diamonds...

And Bruges...

And the beach...

You know what ? Visit Belgium ? Visit Flanders... (that way mi city and mi people can live OK during our "hot" summers... )

Later!